Every effort to be present comes from essence and is an act of love.
The conscious effort to be present
All the efforts we make to maintain the state of presence are sustained by a deep love. This love, like an uncomfortable and permanently lit flame, maintains the necessary desire to self-remember, to be present. During the state of sleep and imagination in which our daily life passes, it is precisely this flame, this love, that comes to our rescue, like a distant whisper. Far away, but uncomfortable enough to be heard and make us wake up.
Transforming identification into a state of love
I recognize the feeling of being identified, by the peculiar taste of urgency that it prints on my machine. Once this realization appears, I can make the decision to allow myself to continue on the slide of inner lethargy or to rise, in a single act, to my own presence. This decision does not imply an internal struggle. If there is a conflict, it means that I am still asleep. Many times it is easier to fight in the dream, in an endless wheel that turns again and again, than to simply wake up, taking advantage of the first shock.
When this occurs, that is, when I have allowed myself to continue being identified, it is probably too late to stop the loss of energy escaping towards the object of identification. However, the unstoppable loss of energy that accompanies the galloping state of identification can be reduced through the non-expression of negative emotion. This almost heroic resource provides us with an immense amount of information about our machine and could lead us to the full realization of the second shock: the transformation of suffering into presence, identification into a state of love.
Scale and Relativity to dissolve the characters in the machine
In everyday life, I can see how, as if it were a play, different characters appear in my machine. They are actually not many. They are almost always the same ones, repeating their lines in a mediocre argument that seems endless, full of appetites, complaints and needs that are built on the fertile soil of self-pity and urgency. Some of these characters are very strong, others more demanding and others very stealthy, almost imperceptible. These are the most difficult to recognize. They are also the ones that tend to flood out my presence because, as they emerge from behind the scenes, they claim the right to be the real “I”.
When they are subjected to the yoke of scale and relativity, I can often observe a partial dissolution of these characters, sometimes a total one. By reducing their sense of self-importance every time we observe their manifestation within us, and seeing them directly as they are, we put light in the dark and can reduce them to their real dimension. Resembling night monsters, produced by the shadows of the furniture in the room, they disappear with the first rays of sunlight.
Revealing our Essence
Our essence is almost captive, hidden behind the strong groups of “I’s” that dominate the map of our machine. Usually, it is so humble and inconspicuous, that it is confused with a whisper, whose breath slips discreetly through the veil of identification. Once the right efforts have been made in the direction of self-remembering, a more real “I” is revealed with a particular flavor that can hardly be forged.
If we are making these efforts to be present, it is this more real “I” who is making them. If we are in any other state, it means that we are identified and that we are being dominated by one of the recurring characters in the play. Making these efforts to be present to ourselves and to our life, more and more often, until they become a permanent state of being – that is the way of love.