No Conflict of Interest

Why you can never 'become present' and how you can learn to resist even from a place of acceptance

“"And it is the version of me that lives within them that is the cause of their resistance." You mentioned this a couple of times in the past articles and it stuck with me. How far would you take this? Everything I highly disapprove in someone else is just a part of myself that I can't accept or am not willed to look at? Am I misinterpreting something here?”

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Every morning, I set off for a walk with my dog and it is the time of day I most enjoy. I am alone on the trails, surrounded by nature which doesn’t require me to be anything other than I am. Nature doesn’t know my name. It doesn’t care what I think of. It honors me by allowing me the space to move through it without judgment. At most I may be viewed as a threat by smaller animals - or as prey by larger ones. But it has no care for my past, for my sins, for my grievances, for my hurts.

When I am in nature, the boundaries that define ‘Shiv’ and give him shape dissipate. The opinions and ideals that crystallize his identity subside. The attitudes, moods and emotions that animate his personality fall dormant. The locus of my sense of self shifts from that of the protagonist, ‘Shiv’, to that of the observing awareness for which Shiv is just one piece of a much vaster narrative.

Life is a singular energy. One being. One movement. Nothing happens independently from it. And when I am on my walks, I experience myself as that singular being. The beating heart of totality. The contents of my narrative - Shiv, his personality, his preferences, his likes and dislikes, his principles and ethics, his emotions and feelings, his hopes and dreams, his fears and anxieties - all fade into the background. Instead, what comes to the forefront is being, the context within which the contents of my life, including the story of Shiv, play out.

So many seekers are misled by pointers directing them to “become present”. What they fail to realize is that you cannot become present because presence is always already the case. You cannot NOT be present because that would mean you would cease to exist. Presence, being, is the medium in which existence unfolds. Asking someone to “be present” is like asking them to “be alive”. It’s absurd.

A more accurate way to phrase the pointer is to “become aware that you are present”. In other words, you are directing the mind towards the underlying state of presence that is a constant. This can have beneficial effects for the mind because it allows it to focus on something steady and reliable - much like when it is witnessing the breath. However, the mind cannot “be present” any more than the mind can “breathe”. It is the mind’s job to project, to imagine, to remember, to analyze. And that is what it must do. Attempting to fix the mind in a static state is like caging a bird and restricting its ability to fly. You might succeed in keeping the bird still but for what benefit and at what cost?

So, the pointer of presence can be misleading. Because we become convinced that we are supposed to keep the mind’s attention fixated on the here and now at all times - which is absurd. Minds will do what minds are designed to do. There is no need to enslave it to some absurd and impossible ideal of “presence”.

Instead, notice that even when the mind is off to the races projecting some future fear or licking its wounds over some past grievance - there is a deeper aspect of you that is simply here. Aware. Vigilant. And always watching. Now.

That aspect is a permanent fixture. It does not need your mind to acknowledge it. It does not need you to work on it, enhance it, develop or evolve it. Presence is unconditional.