Being present isn’t a task. Being present isn’t a task because that is where we are (or how we are) anyway. There isn’t anywhere else to be, no other place exists. Being present can’t be a task because there’s nothing to achieve, nothing to bring about – no effort is needed.

 

 

The task – we might say – is not being present; ‘making sure that we’re in a distracted state’ is what we have to do on purpose. Being distracted is the artificial situation that we have to bring about by our own efforts, by our own design. We need to purposefully make the effort to be not present; this is the artificial situation that we’re obliged to maintain even if we aren’t aware of maintaining anything.

 

 

It doesn’t feel as if this is the case, however. It very much feels that we have to make a special effort in order to be present, but this isn’t true. The more effort we make the less present we are, the more straining we do the more we miss the mark. Trying – in whatever form – always brings us out of the present moment. Trying isn’t the right man for the job at all – trying is an addiction to control that we can’t free ourselves from.

 

 

In everyday life we are under the power of habit, under the power of mechanical compulsion, and the compulsion in question is the compulsion to be distracted all the time. Just as long as we keep obeying the thinking mind we will never ‘not be distracted’ and so we feel – reasonably enough – that we will have to make a big effort if we are to bring ourselves back to the present moment. This just doesn’t work, however – experience shows (as we have said) that the more effort we put into being present the less present we will be as a result. Maximum ‘trying’ equals maximum alienation. We’re making something to be a task when it isn’t.

 

 

Being present (i.e., ‘being in reality rather than our idea of it is’) a natural state and as a natural state it can’t be forced. No natural state can ever be forced. Forcing always comes from thought, after all – we have an idea of how things should be and then – following on from this idea – we try to make it be this way. We apply leverage. The problem with this is obvious therefore – when we try to forcibly undistract ourselves and bring ourselves back to reality (so-called) it’s actually only our idea of reality that we’re bringing ourselves back to. It’s a concept not an actuality.

 

 

The point is that our idea of reality is itself a distraction – thought is always a distraction, no matter what it is that we are thinking about. Our thoughts of happiness are a distraction from happiness, our thoughts about freedom are a distraction from freedom, our thoughts about love are a distraction from love, and so on. Thought – by its very nature – is a description of something, not the thing itself. To describe something to ourselves is always to move away from that thing, therefore; we’re distancing ourselves with our descriptions, with our theories. In our culture we overvalue the thinking process and the accumulation of knowledge that comes from it and the reason this is bad news for us, from a psychological / mental health point of view, is because it alienates us from the reality that we are thinking about, the reality we are accumulating knowledge about. To have ‘positive knowledge’ about the world is absolutely not the same thing as being connected to that world (or being part of it).

 

 

Odd as this may sound therefore, to have knowledge about the world – which comes down to having ideas about it – is an absolute guarantee that we can’t be present in the world. There’s no such thing as ‘a special type of knowledge that will help us to be present’, ‘a special type of know-how that will help us to become psychologically well’. How can we be mentally well and yet be disconnected from reality, disconnected from the core of who we are? What we imagine is – of course – it that our ‘special knowledge’ will somehow reconnect us to what is real, but this is patently absurd – how can there be a special type of thinking that can take us beyond thinking, a special method that can take us beyond all methods, a special type of knowledge that takes us beyond knowledge…?

 

 

When it comes down to it, there are no ‘special types of thinking’, no special methods, no special forms of knowledge that can facilitate us in being present. ‘Being present’ means dropping all our thinking, dropping all our methods, dropping all our so-called ‘knowledge’. That’s the price we have to pay, as Herman Hesse says in his novel Steppenwolf. ‘When you let go of tricks and cleverness, that will be your greatest trick’, says Rumi. Our knowledge is ‘so-called’ because there’s no knowledge regarding ‘how to be present’ any more than there is knowledge about what ‘being present’ means in the first place. Knowledge – like thinking in general – is always about reality, it can never be that reality. Knowledge of a thing isn’t the same thing as the thing; being doesn’t come from thinking about it…

 

 

Doing can never be turned into being, no matter how clever (or forceful) our doing might be. ‘Doing’ is our own stuff, it’s a projection or extension of our thinking, as David Bohm says; knowledge equals thinking and the purposeful activity that comes out of our knowledge which is our description of reality is also thinking. The description of the thing is not the thing and to imagine that acting on our description can lead us to what is being described, the ‘reality itself’, is an illness, pure and simple. It’s an illness that causes us to miss the mark every time – we ‘miss the mark’ but we don’t see that we do. To see our ideas about reality as being the same thing as that reality itself is the basic fundamental sickness that we all suffer from; as The Sutra of Complete Enlightenment says, this is akin to seeing a flower in the sky or seeing a second moon.

 

 

Fast-forwarding through two thousand years or so, we find this same sickness being talked about in terms of Jean Baudrillard’s hyperreality, which is where thought feeds on itself, which is where our signifiers for reality take the place of the genuine article. Hyperreality is a ‘mind-created simulation of the real which possesses zero relationship with the thing itself’. More succinctly, it’s a mirage, it’s a delusion. We have placed the thinking mind on a pedestal because of the powers that it gives us to manipulate / control the physical world, and at the same time we have brought her particularly virulent form of Samsara, a particularly virulent form of human kind’s old sickness upon ourselves. We have created the modern technological world, with all its conveniences, and we have also created the curse of ‘out-of-control hyperreality’, which is a great evil that we are entirely blind to.

 

 

We might try to deliberately offset the suffering that living in hyperreality creates us, but – surprise, surprise – it’s all being orchestrated by thought. Our attempt to escape from the suffering that is caused by thought is orchestrated by thought. We have turned ‘being present’ into yet another task, into an onerous personal responsibility that we’re not allowed to divest ourselves of. Because being present is implicitly being seen as something that needs to be ‘accomplished’, something that needs to be ‘brought about by deliberate or purposeful means’, the accumulation of knowledge is needed, thought is needed, and in this way the primacy (or  centrality) of the thinking mind is secured in perpetuity. It gets to be boss. From the point of view of the rational faculty this is great news, but from any other point of view however it isn’t.

 

 

From the point of view of our mental well-being it absolutely isn’t good news to be ruled over by thought in all things because when we’re disconnected from reality – as we are when we’re engaged in the mind-created simulation of life as opposed to the real thing – then there’s no such thing as ‘mental well-being’, no such thing as ‘mental health’. There is only the superficial copy of it. There’s no happiness, only the theatre of it. As we have said, there’s no way to be present in reality just as long as we’re holding onto our thoughts, holding onto our methods, holding onto our knowledge about the world (which includes of course our knowledge of ourselves) and letting go of all this is the one thing we don’t want to do. That’s our greatest fear right there.

 

 

 

 

 

Image credit – creator.nightcafe.studio