 Presence is spoken about by many and in many places, yet you may not really know what is actually referred to as being present. We say that being present is primarily being free from the illusion of time. Time is a human construct that has been overlaid upon experience. When you are in an experience, you are not in “time”, you're in the sensations of the experience, you're in the narration of the experience, you're in the duration of the experience. Your experience is not confined to the segmented understanding of time, because time is just an overlay of segmented understanding that has no real substantialty. It is completely an illusion. And so, freedom from the illusion of time is freedom from any kind of attachment that causes you to limit or enhance your experience on the basis of this overlay, the construct that is understood as time.
Imagine that you were free of the construct of time. Every encounter you have would be experienced from its seeming start to its seeming finish, and you would be in the midst of that experience always somewhere between “start” and “finish” where there would always be an infinite array of possibilities. If you start to cultivate an awareness of that infinite array of possibilities that exists between this seeming start and seeming finish of any experience, you can cultivate freedom from time. Therefore, what we would identify as presence is understanding that the moment is really the only eternity that exists. Everything else is an attempt to order the experiences, to put them in categories identified as past, or identified as future. What is sometimes identified as present is fleeting. The present is only there for the moment that it is identified as being there, and, when you identify a particular moment as “being” anywhere, you've lost the eternal aspect of that moment. You have set the moment within some parameters that you have identified and defined founded on your characterization of the past and future. All of this might sound very complicated, and yet it is actually incredibly simple. If you want to become more present, start noticing when you are experiencing something and identifying what has come before and what you assume is coming after. It is your attachment to defining your experience with those boundaries that limits your experience of presence. Presence is what is called for at this particular moment. It is called for, because time as a constriction, limitation or even just as a definition or part of your story, is something that is unnecessary. It's unnecessary to be trapped in time, it is appropriate to become free from time and to be here right now in presence. It is the most intimate way that we can experience ourselves and others—it is really all we can share with others. Presence, as freedom from the illusion of time, is natural and easy and with presence comes a knowing of One Life Awareness. One Life awareness is simply the allowing of the usual sense of who and what you are to deepen into the sense of who and what you are that is “beyond” all of your stories-- that is without all of the descriptions you have utilized to tell yourself that you are this or you are that. One Life Awareness is nothing that can be described. It's only something that is known in an intuitive way. While cultivating presence can seem to promote One Life Awareness, nothing is required to know it. You can come to know One Life awareness through different experiences generally sensed as initiatory experiences. These experiences we call random encounters with your deep self. You're going about your everyday activities and then suddenly or slowly--it really doesn't matter--you are no longer narrating the “doing” from your discursive mind. You come into a different place where what you're actually experiencing is experienced directly. There is nothing but your sensations. There are no stories being told. There is an ease and grace about all of it. It's this kind of experience that we would identify as presence, and a touching in with One Life Awareness. Everyone has had these experiences, everyone can have these experiences. There's nothing actually extraordinary about it. In fact, we would say it is one of those ordinary experiences that happens all of the time and what you're actually looking to understand is that you can become a little more cognizant, a little more aware or sensitive to these experiences occurring throughout your life. It is the development of the sensitivity that is, from our perspective, an evolutionary key to understanding, and coming to a deep place of One Life Awareness. Presence is a facilitator, and once the illusion of time as an overlay on your experiences is removed, One Life Awareness is more readily sensed. There are no goals here, no practices are required or even implied. Just allow your experiencing to be whatever it is and know that it is all as it should be—all is simply One Life unfolding with no overlays or limits or boundaries. Experience is the isness of it all. Be present, and simply be who you are.
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