Presence and Awareness

The term "stream of consciousness" would be more accurately called the stream of sensations, the place we usually live in. This is our ongoing contact with sensory impressions, including our outer senses of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching, our body senses of proprioception, interoception, balance, and the rest, and the inner perceptions of our thoughts, mental images, memories, and emotions. The full array of outer and inner sensory impressions serves as the content of our ongoing awareness, the stuff of our life, the stream of sensations.

Consciousness is on a different level, different in kind from our outer and inner senses. We can speak of sensory awareness, as described by the stream of sensations. Or we can speak of conscious awareness. Consciousness, or conscious awareness, is the cognizant screen on which all our senses are displayed. It is the silent background of experience, the streambed of the stream of sensations. We take conscious awareness to mean being in contact with that pure cognition behind the stream of sensations, as well as the sensory impressions themselves. This is the state cultivated in some spiritual practices, for example in mindfulness practice.

Being conscious means more than being aware of the impressions reported by our senses; it means being cognizant of the background awareness itself, not just its sensory contents. It means being with the blank sheet of inner paper, as well as what's written on it. The very notion of being relates to this. To be is to be conscious; not just conscious of something, but to abide in consciousness itself.

Our difficulty in opening to consciousness is that it is hidden from us by our sensory impressions. The colorful, detailed, and meaningful spectacle presented by our senses enthralls our attention, masking the pure awareness on which our senses are displayed. We need to look behind our vision, behind our thoughts, to find consciousness.

Our language does not clearly distinguish between consciousness and awareness. Some usages take awareness as sensory awareness. Others take a broader view, with awareness considered the same as consciousness. For our present purposes, the broader view suffices.

We look, however, at another distinction: that between presence and awareness, or between presence and consciousness. The distinguishing factor is whether there is someone who is aware, who is conscious; whether we are here, awake in ourselves, to be the one who is conscious, or is consciousness happening without us.

Presence means being conscious, or perhaps more clearly, entering our attention as the one whose attention this is, as the one who directs our attention. Intentionally directing and holding our attention is an act will, an act that engages the conscious energy to focus our sensory awareness on the object of attention. We are that will and when we enter our attention, we enter consciousness and thereby become present.

To work toward stabilizing our presence, we apply presence to the body. We inhabit our body, or better yet, we inhabit our whole-body sensation, our sensation body. This establishes us in our body and brings the conscious energy into contact with the sensitive energy, allowing them to blend, build our soul, and serve our planet. When a plant receives the light of the sun, the plant applies photosynthesis to feed itself, while transforming carbon dioxide into the oxygen we all need. When a person practices presence, that person's will, which is the light of the spiritual sun, transforms energies to feed their soul, while releasing energies needed for the spiritual health of all on this Earth. These are hidden benefits of presence.

Notably, presence is a unifying act; in presence we are not separate from our attention, nor is our attention separate from consciousness. Presence unifies the whole of us: body, heart, mind, I, attention, and consciousness. In presence, there is no separation between the one who sees and the seeing, the one who is and the being, no separation between the observer, the observing, and the observed.

That non-separateness is the hallmark of love. Love is unity. If we are to come to love, it must begin in us: the unity of sensing our whole body, the unity of seeing how we are, accepting ourselves as we are, and being as we are, and the three-centered unity of body, heart, and mind, along with consciousness and the I of attention. In presence, I am one. If I am present, I am whole. If I am present, I have no boundaries, nothing separating me from myself, nothing separating me from others. In presence, the peace of consciousness leaves me room to be, without the insistence on being me. These are more hidden benefits of presence, selfless presence: both an expression of and a requirement for love.

For all these reasons, we do well to practice presence as often and as deeply as we can. We do well to work toward living in presence.

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