You keep talking about the state of presence as the key. I think I
understand it intellectually, but I don’t know if I have ever truly
experienced it. I wonder — is it what I think it is, or is it something
entirely different?
It’s not what you think it is! You can’t think about presence, and the
mind can’t understand it. Understanding presence is being present.
Try a little experiment. Close your eyes and say to yourself: “I wonder
what my next thought is going to be.” Then become very alert and
wait for the next thought. Be like a cat watching a mouse hole. What
thought is going to come out of the mouse hole? Try it now.
Well?
I had to wait for quite a long time before a thought came in.
Exactly. As long as you are in a state of intense presence, you are free
of thought. You are still, yet highly alert. The instant your conscious
attention sinks below a certain level, thought rushes in. The mental
noise returns; the stillness is lost. You are back in time.
To test their degree of presence, some Zen masters have been known
to creep up on their students from behind and suddenly hit them with
a stick. Quite a shock! If the student had been fully present and in a
state of alertness, if he had “kept his loin girded and his lamp
burning,” which is one of the analogies that Jesus uses for presence,
he would have noticed the master coming up from behind and
stopped him or stepped aside. But if he were hit, that would mean he
was immersed in thought, which is to say absent, unconscious.
To stay present in everyday life, it helps to be deeply rooted within
yourself; otherwise, the mind, which has incredible momentum, will
drag you along like a wild river.
What do you mean by “rooted within yourself”?
It means to inhabit your body fully. To always have some of your
attention in the inner energy field of your body. To feel the body from
within, so to speak. Body awareness keeps you present. It anchors
you in the Now (see chapter 6).
THE ESOTERIC MEANING OF “WAITING”
In a sense, the state of presence could be compared to waiting. Jesus
used the analogy of waiting in some of his parables. This is not the
usual bored or restless kind of waiting that is a denial of the present
and that I spoke about already. It is not a waiting in which your
attention is focused on some point in the future and the present is
perceived as an undesirable obstacle that prevents you from having
what you want. There is a qualitatively different kind of waiting, one
that requires your total alertness. Something could happen at any
moment, and if you are not absolutely awake, absolutely still, you will
miss it. This is the kind of waiting Jesus talks about. In that state, all
your attention is in the Now. There is none left for daydreaming,
thinking, remembering, anticipating. There is no tension in it, no fear,
just alert presence. You are present with your whole Being, with every
cell of your body. In that state, the “you” that has a past and a future
— the personality, if you like — is hardly there anymore. And yet
nothing of value is lost. You are still essentially yourself. In fact, you
are more fully yourself than you ever were before, or rather it is only
now that you are truly yourself.
“Be like a servant waiting for the return of the master,” says Jesus.
The servant does not know at what hour the master is going to come.
So he stays awake, alert, poised, still, lest he miss the master’s
arrival. In another parable, Jesus speaks of the five careless
(unconscious) women who do not have enough oil (consciousness) to
keep their lamps burning (stay present) and so miss the bridegroom
(the Now) and don’t get to the wedding feast (enlightenment). These
five stand in contrast to the five wise women who have enough oil
(stay conscious).
Even the men who wrote the Gospels did not understand the meaning
of these parables, so the first misinterpretations and distortions crept
in as they were written down. With subsequent erroneous
interpretations, the real meaning was completely lost. These are
parables not about the end of the world but about the end of
psychological time. They point to the transcendence of the egoic mind
and the possibility of living in an entirely new state of consciousness.