The Power of Now

Long-Form Ideas

Musings

All of life can be reduced to one work or action (ੴ): presence. We are presence, and all of life is about presence. Presence is the one leverage point behind all action; to improve in anything requires presence. Things that are (mistakenly) attributed to habits, skill, information, systems, tools, etc. Ultimately, they are downstream of presence.

But how can presence be the ultimate thing? For example, how does learning relate to presence. To make this example more precise, let us talk about the learning of students. Presence is an important part, but skills are their own thing as well. We have the skill of writing, reading, analysis, critical thinking, etc. Surely, they are not just dependent of presence. But, I will say, that learning enhances presence. Knowledge has a progression: complete ignorance, partial ignorance, and then full knowledge. In partial ignorance, we learn partial facts, which are disconnected because of the linear nature of all teaching material (e.g., the written word and lecture). It is up to us to integrate them. Learning changes us. For it to be true learning, it has to become part of us. That means it must change the felt nature of our existence. So, it all comes full circle. It comes from presence and becomes presence.

Furthermore, necessary distance

But, beware of faux presence. Faux presence is the act of being present, something which we, somewhere deep, know is false. It is shallow. I think it is separated from true presence by an attitude or disposition to life: one is our traditional ego-driven taking attitude (demanding) which has become subtle in the name of presence and the other is concerned with receiving and in fact the giving of the self. We cannot imagine what the Lord hath planned or has done, and everything changes us. What has never happened, we can never imagine because we are not those people. So, instead of demanding what is beyond us to conform to us, we should instead be open (e.g., have an open heart) and give ourselves to what is.

We are being present not necessarily to the physical, which is fleeting, but the mental condition. The rest is an illusion. It is focusing overly on the physical that results in us being lost even while trying to be present. We’re ignoring the more important dimension, so we are at the whims of unconsciousness while we’re doing it. Work on the higher realm and lower will follow.

To follow up on the illusion idea: getting better at the dream does not make us better in a meaningful way. Or: drinking more poison does not cure us of the original poison. The same mentality, the same consciousness that created the problem cannot solve the problem. From another perspective, from this video from tibees, we can say that we must act from a higher dimension to efficiently fix things in the lower dimension (i.e., beyond space and time). Ultimately, the world is an illusion. We act with it through our mind: all sensation, all thought arises in the mind. Only then do the senses see. Furthermore, the outer world (or our view of it) is merely a reflection of our inner world. The inner world is more real than our outer world. So, presence has to follow from this principle as well. We have to focus on this inner source, inner spring.

* The gravity metaphor is inspired by this Substack post by Ollie Bray: The Few Seconds Doing All the Work in Meditation

**: Tolle also addresses people’s questions about motivation, i.e., how will we me motivated without attachments. Vacha on Substack talks about how consciousness/awareness naturally expand: Expansions.

***: CWG Book 2 - “Even people who are in jail cells or in sick
beds, completely isolated from others, can
change their outer experience by altering
their inner reality.”

****Joe Dispenza: “If you close your eyes and you disconnect from the outer world… your inner world starts to become more real than your outer world”

*****

Notes

Page Number	Main Idea	Index Card Response	Longer form discussion
12	Thinking: Separation -> Complexity and increasing fragmentation Being: Unity -> Simplicity and increasing shared essence	Although a breakthrough may introduce new language, many breakthroughs are of unity (A is like B), or bringing new concepts for other fields.	Knowledge tends towards unity. Since it comes from one, it may seem like it differentiates, but it ultimately fits into other knowledge (which aligns with the idea of mental models). It’s like our progression is from not knowing anything (ignorance), to individual pieces (intellectual information), to final full, integrated knowledge which is something greater than individual pieces (which may no longer be individual pieces; they are now integrated). Richard Rohr: Order, Disorder, Reorder. See books: The Art of Learning (Josh Waitzkin) and The Inner Art of Tennis
19	Oscillation of thought (mind) and stillness (no mind)	It’s like a ratcheting system or a spiral. Using progressive attempts to slowly push past boundaries and getting deeper.	Use some effort, then come back, and then start again. Instead of using continuous, progressive, linear, and exponential effort (which makes us tired), we use bursts. It avoids the exponential/power rule energy consumption of traditional efforts. We start from inner power, expand outwards, return to the source, and then expand back outwards.
21	Practice: Feeling the body from within.	> ਬਨ ਸੇ ਸਦਨ ਸਬੈ ਕਰ ਸਮਝਹੁ ਮਨ ਹੀ ਮਾਹਿ ਉਦਾਸਾ ॥੧॥ > ਅੰਤਰਗਤਿ ਤੀਰਥਿ ਮਲਿ ਨਾਉ ॥ It’s so deep/we’re so far in. It’s like there’s infinite space in there (keeps us grounded). It is from this posture that learning happens.
34	Pain Body and addiction	How is my addiction part of the pain body? Also, sleep pattern? And phone usage?	This is still at-large.
46	”The energy that is withdrawn from the mind turns into presence”	In my own practice, the more present I am, the less thought there is.	The space between thoughts expands. In it, thoughts are like waves that rise up. And then losing myself in thought returns me to psychological time, because I need to connect disparate ideas across time (building a house across sand).
51	There is a faux presence; we were/are resisting the past and it continues in the present.		We can fake presence, to a certain extent. It’s when we’re just trying to keep up appearances or just going through the motions. In it, we are not actually present. We’re absent from the house. We will always know when it is faked.
52	There are no problems in the present	A whole class of issues requires being in psychological time. How big is the class?	I think it covers most issues. In the present moment, we’re only looking at the step right in front of us. The rest, like anxiety, over thinking, planning, etc, requires, as the last cell talks about, us to create a house on sand. Take offense, for example: we have to compile examples across time to make it work. It saves a lot of energy: we’re not juggling these large and impossible bundles of pain and events.
59	Past = Identity, Future = Fulfillment	All of these stems from a need for continuity (the identity now exists, so it must persist). I wonder what would happen if we completely unmoored from time when chasing discoveries? Will be be stuck in les ruts? Will it take less time? A lot of the failure to progress comes from resisting what is so - we want to be more advanced than we are, so we avoid the need to hunker down and work, or even to take temporary steps backwards.	Like I talked about earlier, the present moment has very few problems and a more efficient use of energy, because we’re addressing things one at a time. Need to finish
69	Presence has no speed	Need to explore this more. For me, presence leads to becoming slow.
80	People don’t realize that it is presence that results in beauty, joy, etc; these moments happen because of a radical change in perception for that certain time.	Osho - the asleep people work by habits. Those who are awake work by their essence/character. People misattribute the credit to habit.s	There are no tricks, setups, or habits that can force you to do anything or change anything. The change must happen in you.
83	Parable of the prodigal son -> we may return to the same situation, but now there is added depth	Even if the outer circumstances look the same, we are always changed by every experience.	We grow through every experience, so although it may take us a long time to get to the same starting point (it may seem like we regress), but that was important growth for us to properly move forward from a situation.
90	Words point to the experience of things; their meaning is beyond themselves.		When I’m reading, I try to force it (learning, comprehension). That results in me hanging on too tightly to words. So tightly, that in fact I retain none of it and make no overarching connections. When I hold words lightly and am just there, I can somehow connect to the essence of the words. If you think about it, the whole point of reading and writing is not the words themselves; they are vessels to communicate the message and the experience. It’s the overarching idea and presence that should be focused upon. It may take paragraphs of words to communicate a single idea (connection back to the note on page 12, an idea is an integrated whole, with so much nuance—it contains a whole universe, the universe to be exact—and to express it, it must be broken down into constituent parts). The reader has to reassemble tho whole.
115	Feeling space (emptiness) allows us to detach from physical and mental objects	Reduces our grip and attachment to them	Our typical worldview, if compared to like a map, is a really zoomed in version of the map. We’re right up with things and so close and attached. Feeling space, or presence, allows us to create distance: we zoom right out. Their gravity no longer affects us as much. It creates detachment.