NOEMAYA

There is nothing but presence: what I experience right now is the presence of things around me, the room, the desk, the book, the river view, my body, etc.. But what are any of these objects? It’s another presence. The book, or more precisely, my experience of the book: it’s the presence of some form, the geometrical shape of the book and pages and written symbols inside it; then it’s the presence of colors, and of material sensations when I touch the book and its pages; I feel presence of more and more things in all these encounters, a presence of deeper layers, and then I put a name on the cluster of sensations in each of these levels of presence; but when I zoom in to grasp them, there’s deeper and deeper presences, an apparently indefinite chain which I have named and have taken the names to be the real thing whereas there’s always deeper presences lying behind them. So, in relegating the reality and presence of a thing to a substratum, to what’s behind it, I enter into a hopeless pursuit of reality, thinking presence comes from things instead of seeing that it really comes from me. It’s in my presence that the world is present. 

At the deeper level of all investigations lies the quantum field which is practically a nothing, not a material essence but an ineffable thing that can manifest itself in different ways: as waves or particles. At the end of all this, we see that there’s really nothing concrete that is present, no final entity whose presence shines forth; rather, what is there is sheer presence, a no-thing, along with all the names we’ve assigned to the many different forms of this presence. 

Of a thing and its presence: the misconception is that the presence of a thing is inseparably attached to the thing as if it’s a part of it. But presence can’t be a quality or reality belonging to a material form, because presence is incommensurable with form and matter; it is peculiar to consciousness. Rather, a thing is nothing but a manifold of presence, a presencing field, and I am that field.

What is truly there, what is truly real, is only presence. Once we strip this field of all the names and forms, of all labels, then we find the blissful presence from which we are not separate. So, don’t try to be present; notice that you are already present, not as a thing that dwells in the present moment: you are not a thing; you are the very presence of the present moment. That’s your reality whereas your humanity is the veil that’s masking it.

What then is presence? It is a living and flowing, indivisible field of names/labels that appear to divide and separate. What we experience is then an experience of separation, but notice that this experience of apparent separation wouldn’t be possible without an indivisible and unbroken stream of the very experiencing in which separation is experienced; and that streaming, that presencing, That Thou Art.