What Is Real?

Our concepts shape our perceptions and thereby constrain our experience. When we have an experience that transcends all prior experiences and all our concepts, what happens next depends on the strength of that experience. If it is fleeting, it may not register at all. If it is strong, we may remember it as an isolated one-off without context, without any other connection to us, or to our life.

But in some cases, such an experience can be so revelatory, vivid, and real, so self-transcendent that we devote the subsequent years, or even decades, to cultivating our soul toward the sacred station that we glimpsed.

In another category are the everyday experiences that do not fit within our conceptual framework, within our world view. These may be very deep, ongoing experiences, but they fall outside our ability to perceive them consciously. Expanding our world view, becoming less certain, less rigid, more truly humble, can help us make clear and obvious what was hitherto subtle, and thus help us see beyond our concepts.

So it is with will and God. Even for the deepest levels, we can work to open our perceptions, to dispose ourselves toward the Real, to become available, to transcend the illusion of separateness and isolation. Rather than always focusing on specifics, such as the name we go by, a mere label that seems almost more real than our body, we widen out into the great whole that embraces us, the whole of which we are an emanation. In focusing, we are that singular emanation, in broadening we awaken into and as the whole.

We see a person essentially as an agent, not as an energy or bundle of energies. Energies do not act, do not initiate, do not have agency. Energy is the fuel for work and the substance of our bodies, but does not give direction, nor make choices, decisions, or commitments. We may think of people as beings, but it is their will that is their essence. We speak of God's will and consider God to be an agent, not an energy, not even the universal field of conscious energy. A person acts. God acts. Consciousness is. While it is a necessary conduit for transmitting acts into the material world, consciousness is not the actor.

The Divine is not energy but is Will, the One Will, in and of All.[1] We have energies. We can be in energies, for example we can be in consciousness. We can characterize our being as organized energies. But we are not any energy. We are our will. The Universe has the Will to be itself, to be the All. That Will is what humans have always fundamentally referred to when we use the term God or Divine. We feel that God is the Creator, that God hears and responds to prayers, and that God knows and sees all. These are acts of will. Seeing is an act of will, mediated by energies, such as consciousness; the seer is the will who uses consciousness to see.

After accepting the possibilities of the reality of will, of the Divine as Will, and of ourselves as individualized will, what matters is stepping beyond these concepts into the direct realization. This also requires an act of will, an action of emptying and opening.

To be is an act, an act of will, neither an active assertion nor a passive acquiescence, but rather the third mode of harmonic synergy. To be is to situate oneself, one's attention, in the field of consciousness, within the wholeness of body, heart, and mind, and there to be that one who is situating, who is seeing and experiencing. We let go of being our small self, which bears the label of our name, and relax back behind that, behind our thoughts, behind our emotions, into the root of our attention. In that state we can simply be. In that state, the deep attention finds its opening and comes into us from the vastness behind us, from beyond us, and passing through us becomes us. We are simply, vividly, and effortlessly here. We call this presence.

To be present is not unusual for us. Yet it tends to be fleeting and thus overlooked, its perceived significance waning in proportion to its brevity. The intentional act of being, the intentional act of opening into presence, deepens our place in the timeless and thereby extends our presence in time. It reveals itself to be the fundamental quality of any moment of reality. We are only real when we are present, when we are our attention, our will, our I: the essential reality of who and what we truly are.[2]

[1] See J.G. Bennett: Dramatic Universe; Volume IV, final section

[2] Note, in this context, the title of G.I. Gurdjieff's book: Life is Real Only Then When "I Am"

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