Presence

What is Presence?

Eckhart Tolle§ describes presence as the immediate awareness of this moment, recognized before the mind names or interprets what it notices. It is not a technique. It is not a state to be reached and then occupied. It is what is already the case, moment to moment, before thought begins.

Presence is not concentration, not relaxation, and not mindfulness§ in the technique sense. It is the recognition that awareness is already happening. Most of what the mind does is about experience: naming, comparing, evaluating. Presence is what was already the case before that commentary started. It remains while commentary continues. It persists when commentary stops.

Tolle's instruction

Tolle's working instruction across his books is some version of this: notice the next sense impression, the sound, the breath, the felt weight of the body, and meet it without first naming or comparing it to anything else. The naming and comparing is mind-activity. What does the noticing is presence. The instruction is repeated because presence is not a state to reach and occupy. It is the always-available ground that the mind continuously overlooks by attending to its own commentary. For Tolle, most human suffering arises from identification with the stream of thought rather than with the awareness that notices thought. Recognizing presence breaks that identification, at least momentarily.

Cross-traditional convergence

Brother Lawrence's§ seventeenth-century practice of the presence of God names the same thing structurally. It is the cultivation of awareness of what is always-already given, maintained through ordinary tasks. Just sitting in Zen§ is the same recognition. Rupert Spira's§ being aware of being aware is the same. The traditions disagree about much. On this point they converge enough that the convergence is itself worth noting. The disagreements concern what presence ultimately is — whether it is God, pure consciousness, or simply the nature of mind. The convergence concerns how it is found: by noticing what is already here, rather than by acquiring something new.

Presence vs mindfulness, concentration, and flow

[Mindfulness](lexicon:mindfulness) in contemporary usage is a deliberate practice: sustaining attention on breath or body. Presence, in Tolle's sense, is not a practice. It is the recognition that the practice is pointing toward. Concentration is directed attention held on an object. Presence is open, undirected awareness. Flow is absorbed activity where self-consciousness drops away in skilled performance. It is a by-product of doing something well. Presence is prior to doing. It is the awareness in which any activity occurs.