Presence Contact

(The Practice of Divine Presence: 2)

From contact through our senses with our body, mind, emotions, and our surroundings, we next move toward contact with presence, both our own presence and the presence of everything around us. We can start with either, because these two zones of presence complement each other. Unexpectedly, by opening to the presence of all that is around us, that presence embraces and seeps into us, awakening and enhancing our own presence. This is presence from outside in.

Presence from the inside out begins with your own presence. From your own within, you can open to the within of material objects and of living things and other people. From your within, you can look outside yourself to the within of all you see. You cannot see the presence in the external world with your ordinary vision, but you can perceive it directly from your presence, from your within to the similar within-ness of living things and people, and even of material objects.

All of us and everything have presence and the power of agency. In material objects, that agency is the rudimentary and static will to be what they are, with no power of choice. Regardless of the complexity of some material objects, their intentions are limited to being what they are and nothing more. And the presence of material objects is also rudimentary and simple: just being what they are. Their static presence is wholly contained within their physical boundaries.

In living things, and especially in animals and even more so in humans, presence and agency are vivid and dynamic. There is a continuum of emergent agency from the material through the living and into the spiritual, a subject we will explore in a future installment of this inner work series. For now, what matters is that presence and agency give us a powerful, fundamental, and all-embracing domain through which we can relate to and perceive the same in both the living and the non-living.

The work of this second stage of the practice of Divine Presence is to open into our own inwardness, into our own presence and agency, and to perceive the presence and agency of all that surrounds us. In the first stage we practiced opening our senses to the whole, the whole that includes ourselves and our immediate environment, all that we can see with our vision wide. With that as our baseline, as our sensory perception of everything and everyone, we open into and behind our senses, behind the surface, and into the within, the presence, the intention, the will-to-be within us and within everything and everyone.

From the simple will-to-be-what-they-are of material things to the dynamic presence and freedom of action of human beings, we open to whole range of the world we live in, engaging with what is shared among all and in all. We look for that presence and find it everywhere, within everything and everyone. We let ourselves live in this world of presence, ubiquitous presence.

This is not to say that everything is alive, but everything is meaningful. Everything is what it is. To say that, in this context, is not a trivial tautology. Just as we are what we are, and just as that bare fact of being means a great deal to us, so it is for everything else. For anything to be what it is means something. Our opportunity is to open into that meaningful, all-pervasive world of presence and agency. Our path toward the Divine Presence can go through that. Just as you can say with Moses: "Here I am," the same holds for everyone and, in a simplified but no less true form, for everything.

For this week, open into contact with the world of presence, in yourself and all around you. We are not passive in this: we look deeply into the world and find presence everywhere. It is an intentional practice. This is the second stage of the practice of Divine Presence.

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