Being Present

True peace is found through presence.  People are conditioned to live entirely through a derivative sense of self called the ego, which avoids a sense of presence, and therefore peace, at all costs.  Only by developing presence does the suffering that accompanies the ego dissipate. Mystics and contemplative traditions have described the falsehood that we are our thoughts by posing the question for contemplation "If we are merely our mind, who, then, is doing the thinking?"  The answer is that our real selves - buried deep under our egos, under our identities, under our incessant mind activity - can emerge as the peaceful core of consciousness only through the cultivation of presence.

What is presence?

On one level, presence is the description of the when and where of awareness.  If your awareness is fully here, fully now, you are present.  Knowing when you are present can be tricky, as the conditioned mind so easily falls back into the repetitive dysfunction of thought, and while you may think you are present, your mind is really off wandering about this problem or that opportunity.  We are trained our whole lives to calculate, discriminate, separate, defend, argue, etc.  What this translates into is a mind that is trained to build and then reinforce a massive psychological edifice called the ego.  Virtually everyone lives their lives by the guiding instinct of their egos.  While many people don't recognize what this means and how their ego guides their lives, it is very important that such an important role not go unexamined.  It is, after all, guiding most people's decisions and behavior the world over.

On another level, presence is a habit.  Just like I might develop the healthy habit of remembering to stay optimistic when I get presented with bad news, presence is the habit of reminding oneself to monitor one's thoughts, judgments, discriminations, complaints, etc.  Presence can be learned just like we have learned its opposite - to constantly live through the various identities we have convinced ourselves are real.

How is thought dysfunctional, and is this related to the ego?

Obviously not all thought is dysfunctional.  Here we are concerned with thoughts that diminish our presence, which can be defined as thoughts that derive essentially from the ego.  Again, ego eliminates presence, and presence eliminates ego. In this sense, mind and ego are synonymous.  There are innumerable thoughts that derive from the ego, but here are a few common ones:

I am better than you.  You are better than me.  He is fat.  She is beautiful.  I have a great car.  I am afraid of rejection.  I am envious of my neighbor.  I wish I was famous.  I want a promotion.  My job sucks.  I don't make enough money. My spouse is responsible for my happiness.  I am angry.  My spouse completes me.  I need to be loved.  Why am I always mistreated?  That person is a loser.

The common characteristic of all these thoughts is fear.  Fear is the ego's greatest motivator and its prime tool to cultivate desired behavior and thought patterns.  In each thought listed above, fear can be seen operating beneath the thought in one of two forms: fear of oneself being diminished by some innate personal inadequacy, and fear of oneself being diminished by another's superiority.  In reality, these both distill down to the fear that we are not important enough to justify feeling good about ourselves.  Thus, the ego propagates the delusion that it is the answer to this core dilemma in life: how do we feel good enough about ourselves to be happy?

The truth is that the ego is not part of the solution; it is the problem.  If we have an insatiable appetite for feeling good about ourselves through ego gratification in its various forms - achievement, sex, money, power, fame, glory, beauty - we are seduced into pursuing these feelings without end by constantly striving to achieve more, be better, be different, be smarter, be more beautiful.  And the secret that the ego does not for sake of its existence want us to discover is that no quantity of these feelings will ever provide peace.  Even if we become vastly wealthy we have merely replaced the fear of being unimportant because we are poor with the fear of losing our wealth (and thus becoming unimportant again).  The more we have invested our sense of self-worth in these egoic achievements, the more precariously perched our sense of self-worth will be on external contingencies.  Some of the wealthiest people I know are also some of the least powerful.  Jesus described this when he said "the meek will inherit the Earth."   True power comes not from what one can accumulate, but what one can live without.  True power, true peace comes from the dissolution of the ego.

Does this suggest that peace can only be achieved when one forgoes material possessions?

Not at all.  In fact, as Krishnamurti has pointed out we have to be careful that we don't substitute the sense of identity that comes from the "stuff" we own with a sense of identity that we are somehow more "spiritual" than others because of we might renounce.  Both mental positions are ways our ego can slide back into the picture to create a sense of self-worth.  Both are false and distract from real peace. 

Using possessions as an example of the deeper process we'd like to employ, we will not let ourselves become attached to our possessions because we won't let our sense of self be identified by them and our sense of self-worth validated by them.  Having a nice house is comfortable; it allows for the storage of lots of stuff; it provides lots of rooms for various diversions.  But it is not who I am.  It does not represent the ascendancy of my self-worth over others.  I will not allow it to become part of my identity because there is something I like a lot more than my nice house: pure, untouchable peace.

It is counter-intuitive that my identity is the problem.

The ego is a complex psychological edifice that operates on a recursive but faulty premise: that I am incomplete, and because I am incomplete I need to fill the incompleteness with stuff, and the best way to achieve the stuff is to employ the ego.  (Obviously I become attached to this stuff because I perceive that it completes me; I've bought the lie.)  The ego can be thought of as a complex adaptive thought system, born of our felt transiency and conditioned by years of positive feedback.  When I won the baseball championships when I was 12, my ego learned yet one more time that being a championship baseball player felt really good in defining me as someone worthy of distinction, praise, even love.  When that identity wore thin and no longer compensated for my deep sense of inadequacy, I found another: I moved on to investing my identity completely in my hope and then achievement of my first love.  Later in life, I might live fully through my identity as a loving father, a winning CEO, a brilliant academic, a passionate artist, etc.  These things come to define me so fully in my own sense of self that the thought of them dissolving through failure, a firing, a divorce, or some other situational change that I feel absolutely worthless without them.  I am so afraid of losing these descriptors because I have never defined myself in other terms; any threat to my identity becomes a literal threat to my very being.

So the reason it is hard to recognize the immense power of the ego is that we become so fully identified with our minds and these roles we play that we are unable to spontaneously step outside of them to see how they operate our lives.  They are the lenses through which we perceive everything life; if asked, we would say they are literally who we are. 

The reason enlightenment is often preceded by deeply traumatic life changes, or in the case of certain mystics the purposeful renunciation of all attachments, is that only by losing what we heretofore thought defined us and getting away from the deep conditioning of our identities do we awaken to the deeper truth.

How does a normal person, who doesn't want to live in a cave in India, achieve this deeper peace?

Two things happen simultaneously when enlightenment begins, and they are two sides of the same coin.  First, temporality disappears; second, dualism disappears (not Cartesian mind-body dualism here, but subject-object dualism).

Temporality will disappear when you decide to allow it to by living fully and completely in the present moment.  In the light of our presence the judgments and discrimination of the ego cannot survive to create a false sense of self.  And it starts with this simple (yet not easy) realization: no moment you will ever live has occurred in the past, nor has it occurred in the future.  The only substrate we are given upon which to live our lives is the present moment, now.

When you are able to breathe deeply and silently observe the mental chatter that occurs in your brain, you are by definition present.  This must occur without judgment, without prejudice, without labeling, and without all of the other opining that the ego mind loves to interject in the thought stream, otherwise your presence will dissipate.  The moment we begin to characterize and label our thoughts, our environment, and what is happening around us we have taken ourselves out of the present moment and put ourselves into our own mind-projection of reality, which by definition is not actually occurring as we think it is: we are experiencing it purely through the biased subjectivity of a long-conditioned ego-mind.  Mind is anti-presence.

Second, as you learn to live silently in the present, without judgment and incessant mind activity, the constant identification of form that creates dualism disappears.  As I no longer incessantly identify with "me" and "mine" - that is, my discriminatory ego ceases - a powerful spiritual transformation occurs that allows for a startling recognition: all things are deeply interconnected as an ontological unity.

When I sit quietly I find that keeping my mind focused on the present is difficult.

This is natural, as years of conditioning has taught your mind to do just the opposite.  The powerful practice of meditation - which can be performed alone at home or at a crowded Starbuck's - is designed to undo this conditioning and teach your mind that it doesn't need to operate incessantly.  Over time you can train your mind to operate only when you want it to and only under the terms you allow; specifically, when you are ready to use one of your wonderful mental faculties (perhaps analysis or vocalization), and only in a way that serves the present moment but not your ego.

Breathing deeply is another important tool that can be used to cultivate presence.  The yogic saying that we live as we breathe is true; the next time you find yourself under pressure or stress, take a deep breath, and feel the tension and negativity disappear.  This, too, can over time become a powerful habit.

In any case, the central practice is the same: allow your awareness to be in the present moment, which you do by observing the mind without judgment, without discrimination, and without opinions.  Do not identify with what you see or hear; do not label things as good and bad, right and wrong, etc.  Allow your senses to feed the sensory input directly into your awareness without passing the the usual filter of judgment.  See if you can hear a sound as it is in its essence - a pure uncharacterized sound - the way it might sound to a rock or to a bird that is not capable of labeling it as car or waterfall or thunder.  This ability progresses with practice, and at some point provides the foundation for seeing the world in completely fresh ways, unhindered by dogma and vocabulary.  Eventually this leads to the discovery of how misleading (absurd?) our epistemologies are and an understanding of what is meant by the Zen saying "mu," or "unask the question."  True answers cannot be found with the discriminatory intellect, so the only appropriate answer to certain questions is: "unask the question."

Comments

[Cheap Drugs Online]

sometimes we think negative side that cause delayed with our works and habit. This a barrier attitude that we have to change. Because if you are positive in all aspect and not questioning which is "better than", you will be successful.

[healthy lifestyle]

those who think which is "better than him or her" are people who have low self-esteem and low confidence.