Total Presence: Presence Tool 12

Inner Frontier
Fourth Way Spiritual Practice

Inner Work

For week of October 5, 2015

Total Presence

Combining our prior efforts on inhabiting body, heart, and mind, with that of being conscious, enables us to begin our work on total or complete presence, which encompasses three levels, three worlds. The first is at the level of time, the world of our senses, our body, our emotions, and our thoughts. The second is at the level of eternity, the timelessness of just being, of pure awareness, of consciousness, wherein nothing is happening, where we just are. The third is the world of will, our source, the source of our I, of who we are.

Total presence unites all three levels in us; it brings the timeless into time. Bridging that gap is who we are, what we are built for. Our will, our I, originates in the spiritual realm of pure action, decision, and choice, well beyond ordinary time. Through the medium of consciousness, which is timeless in an eternal, is-ness sort of way, our will crosses from pure action into time. We cross into inhabiting our life, participating as the one who is aware, the one who chooses, the one who acts in time. Thus our will, our I forms the central pole, bridging and uniting the three levels in us.

What does this mean in practical, experiential terms? Starting from below, we begin by opening our awareness to embrace our entire body. Then we also include our mind and heart. Taking a step up, we relax into the cognizant stillness of consciousness, the pure awareness surrounding and permeating us, beneath our perceptions of body, heart, and mind. At the same time, we maintain awareness of our body, heart, and mind. It is as if we find ourselves in a spacious cognizance that includes all of our parts.

Then comes the crucial, stabilizing step of bringing our self, our I, our will, our attention into contact, passing through the cognizant stillness and into our body, heart, and mind. To some degree, this has already happened in the earlier steps. But now we make it explicit to ourselves that “I” am here in this. We make it, we make our self, robust. We stand here in ourselves, in our body, heart, and mind, in our consciousness, as our self, as our I, as our attention.

For this week, please practice total presence.

Follow @innerfrontier

About Inner Frontier Send us email