What Is Presence? (And Escaping The Prison Of The Mind)

Todays writing as read in the video…
What is presence ?
During breathwork
There are these moments
I call them tiny eternities
Where you arrive into the now
So entirely
That you disappear
You become pure being
All dualities disappear
You are beingness
Beaming in the glow of being
And nothing less or more
At first it’s scary
Because it’s like the illusionary you
Shatters against the wall of this tiny eternity
Breaking down again into the vortex of infinity
You’ll forgive this foray into poetry
As presence itself is rather indescribable
The pathways and places we have within.
Because as it turns out
Nothingness is hardly nothing at all
And people are mostly comfortable
With attempts to describe it
Until you call it God
Perhaps enlightenment is nothing more
Than swapping the addiction to thinking
For the addiction of pursuing presence
Or recognizing the superiority of nowness
Versus the domain of thought which only exists
In the past and the future
Where actual life
Is replaced by an idea about life
Where the eternal is swapped for a concept
Where your actual being is replaced
By a mind made construct of who and what you are
So what is presence?
What is this tiny eternity?
And why does the mind make it so difficult to experience?
The mind or the ego is an illusionary construct
Concerned with its own dominion
And so it invests in conflict and judgment
Attempting to create a gravitational pull
Into its non real reality
Ego and presence are warring factions
On the battlefield of our souls
Or two opposing operating systems
Vying for dominion over us all
The ego likes noise
And distraction
It likes conflict and judgement
It basks in separation and anger
And it becomes massive in the energy of hate
Envy and jealousy are its friends
And it drives through illusionary landscapes
In the vehicle called fear
Presence on the other hand
Favors quiet
Expands in silence
Requires absolute forgiveness
Refuses judgement and conflict
And demands peace as a barrier to entrance
Into its domain
And if one can manage to slay all the demons of the ego
They find an opportunity to expand into presence
And its energy field called love
As the only true reality
This is why a statement like
All there is is love
Is both true
And yet seems so foreign
And impossibly idealistic to one who is firmly rooted in egoic reality or unreality
For the two realities we dance between
Are entirely opposed to one another
2
For me this describes the spiritual battlefield
We are all born into
And life could be described as an opportunity to overcome an illusion
Of who we thought we were
To be born into the awareness of what we actually are
No different from or to the infinite source of all things
For when we do arrive in presence
We find ourselves relating not to nothingness
But to a very real somethingness
And that something
Seems to be exuding a healing light into our souls
Perhaps redefining our nature
Into its energy field
One could describe it as our souls allowing its light in
Allowing its peace to take root
And accessing the power of eternity it holds
Into the vortex of our being
Communing with God you could say,
Where all separation ceases to be
One could say Jesus came here in part to teach us how to commune with this source
Or the source
His instructions laid out perfectly a path to defeat the stronghold of the ego
Or the phantom of self will
Resistance to his teaching
Is nothing more than the egos attempt to remain
The dominate force in a reality
That contains no reality at all
Many are uncomfortable with the word God
Or a pragmatic reference to Jesus
But have no problem with the word presence
And would rather avoid the controversy
Around religious terminology altogether
But they breakdown to the very same thing
And in the case of Jesus
His teachings are both perfect and undeniable
In this regard
One may feel more comfortable saying
I’m spiritual but not religious
But they are really only playing games with semantics
And anyway on the level of words
We are dealing with concepts only
And so we are still in the realm of the mind
Presence itself exists outside of all that
It exists outside of ideas about it
It is a place of no ideas
No words
No stories
It is a place where the Holy Spirit groans on our behalf
Someplace beyond all language
Everything else is merely an instruction manual
Guiding you into its light
3
Once you experience that light
It calls you back to it
Over and over again
The ego becomes vaporous
As do all its schemes
The death of the ego is difficult at first
But with it the experience of peace
Eases one into a new reality
Much more real than the old one
And so this letting go of insanity of division becomes something like an instant relief
All the conflicts and stories disappearing into the vapor they always were
Where finally you are enabled to meet life where it actually is
In the now
Josepharthur.com for more info. Peace!

[@MichaelJohnson-wk8tk]

Loved the message and your attire. Thanks for sharing.

[@lorilee8591]

I absolutely love your reflections and writing! Everything you say is like a confirmation to what I've learned and grown into. 🤗 thank you so much for sharing your journey... heart, mind and soul ✨️ 🙏💜

[@SmileThatExplodes]

love ❤😊

[@danmurphy5715]

Begin training by knowing nothing. As you learn, your mind fills. With mastery (and the fullest of presence) the mind is empty. The path suggests a circle.