Presence

Friday prayers in Bagdhad

* Around and around the house
the leaves fall thick,
but never fast,
for they come circling down
with a dead lightness
that is sombre and slow.
- Charles Dickens

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Matthew 25 Network launches pro-Obama ads on Christian radio

The name of the Matthew 25 Project comes from the 25th chapter of the Biblical book of Matthew, quoting Jesus: “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit.

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Someone says "I can't help feeding my family.
I have to work so hard to earn a living."
He can do without God, but not without food;
he can do without Religion,
but not without idols.
What is one who'll say,
"If I eat bread without awareness of God,
I will choke."

Rumi, Mathnawi, II, 3071-79

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At one point in my journey, my teacher's teacher, an eighty-year old man, had been in a serious car accident that had brought him near death. For months the master's condition was uncertain, causing all those who loved him to become acutely aware of what his living flesh-and-blood friendship meant to them. Eventually he would recover and live many more years. When he was well enough to barely walk, he phoned my teacher to tell him that he would have a special lesson if he could come to his apartment on a certain night. Since this was the first opportunity for the two of them to be together in months, my teacher was full of expectation. They took a walk that evening, so slow and deliberate that it emphasized the attention required for each painful step. They walked as far as one of the most elegant drinking establishments of that great city. My teacher's teacher opened the door of that tavern and they entered. It was as if they were perfectly invisible, while the patrons, the most fashionable men and women, continued in their loud, intoxicated conversations. "See?" he simply said.

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In our ordinary state of being, both the outer demands of life and the inner processes of thinking and feeling alternatively monopolize our attention to such an extent that we cannot sustain true consciousness. By consciousness I mean not just perception or awareness which corresponds to the sensitive energy described earlier, but a field of awareness that includes both the contents of an experience and the one who experiences.

Spiritual work involves maintaining some balance between the demands of outer life and a conscious presence.  We wish to enter freely into the life of the world and still know presence,  the dimension of consciousness and freedom.  We can live through the essence,  which is the light behind the personality,  rather than through the limited,  superficial personality,   which is identified with each passing thought and feeling.

The personality is our superficial identity, our learned behavior and attitudes;  it is tied to the conditions of outer life,  to disapproval and approval,  like and dislike,  praise and blame.  We are working so that this essence,  which can truly say "I am," may come forward in the midst of life.

The personality,  which is absorbed in the external world and forgetful of the possibility of an inner life,  is governed by that world.  All its inner events are tied to outer events and things.  The personality  exists first of all in relation to other people and things and wants to have its way with them.  it feels its own existence through what it achieves and what it possesses.  Conversely,  each disappointment,  each rejection,  and each failure is experienced as a challenge and threat to its own existence.

Are we consumed by the experiences of life?  Or do we consciously experience life with mindfulness and trust?  Is our inner life dependent on outer conditions,  or is it becoming free of them?

The transformation with which inner work is concerned allows the "I" to exist more independently as a pure presence or witness.  The slavery to like and dislike is diminished to the extent that our feeling of "I" is grounded in pure Being and not in things.  The need to achieve our own specialness,  for instance,  or to receive attention from others,  is experienced as less important as a stable inner presence develops.  This inner presence is satisfying in itself;  it enables nonattachment,  equanimity,  and greater objectivity.

Presence guides us to a healthy sense of self-restraint and self-sacrifice,  enabling us to play with our attachments,  to confront our own prison.  We may learn to slip out of the stranglehold of egoism,  which is based in desire and in the thoughts generated by desire.  In being present to the play of desire we can diminish the ego's power over our inner being.

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We are knee deep in a river,  searching for water.  We are part of an invisible river,  but we are so distracted by outer things and what we imagine they could mean to us that we lost contact with the source of our own Being.  When we are caught in desire,  in form,  in externals,  we are pulled out of ourselves into a fantasy world,  a desire world.  We lost touch with the invisible river,  the waters of life,  through our identification with unconscious inner processes and with outer demands.

There is an energy of attention that we at first have in only limited amounts.  The loss of this energy has been described by the great thirteenth-century Sufi poet and saint Jelaluddin Rumi:

You have scattered your awareness in all directions,
and your vanities are not worth a bit of cabbage.
The root of every thorn
draws the water of your attention toward itself.
How will the water of your attention reach the fruit?
Cut through the evil roots,  cut them away,
Direct the bounty of God to spirit and to insight,
not to the knotted and broken world outside.

Mathnawi,  V,  1084-86

There is an energy of attention that must be conserved.  Can we see ourselves throwing it away?  Can we see ourselves wasting it on outer desire and satisfactions,  intoxicated with the random demands of the ego,  responding to all the needs of outer approval and validation?  Our dependence on outer satisfactions and requirements leads us to envy,  resentment,  pride,  guilt,  and anger.  Isn't this the contemporary idolatry?

Whoever makes all cares into a single care,  the care for simply being present,  will be relieved of all care by that Presence,  which is the creative power.  We can take a step back from the world of attraction,  comparison, and dependence on externals,  remember this vitality within us,  and connect with it.  Perhaps then we can be liberated from our compulsions and can learn to act through Spirit,  rather than through our limited egos.

If remembering Presence becomes our single care,  then we will waste less of our inner energy.

--From LIVING PRESENCE -- A Sufi Way to Mindfulness & the Essential Self
    Kabir Edmund Helminski

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"Love is recklessness not reason"

Helminski from LIVING PRESENCE

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