Presence

The experience of self and world

“I am present among the things of the world, and they are present to me.”  

This statement is profoundly significant to me, almost a credo, but at first glance it’s not really clear what it means or why it might be important to anybody other than myself.  We will have to peel back a few layers to get to the answers in these matters, but in my opinion, the return very much justifies the investment of time and energy.  

The key concept is presence. Starting with a very rough unpacking of the idea of presence, it means existence, not as a bare abstraction, but as you ideally experience it. Our sense of presence gives us a heightened awareness of self and world. It’s the boldness of things when you really pay attention to them. Your own presence is something that you can feel all over. It suffuses your body and engages your eyes. It is your “aura.” The presence of the things in the world is experienced as their vividness and solidity, whether we are talking about objects that are literally visible and solid or not.   

It may sound a little silly at first, but the experience of presence means that self and world seem “really real” to you. This way of putting it presupposes that there is a way for things to seem “real” without seeming “really real.” 

Let me provide a few concrete examples of a lack of a “really realness feeling”: The first is a person who takes the world and his place in it completely for granted, going through his life without lifting his eyes from the pavement and without seeking out bracing alternatives. Such a man is not experiencing presence. Things are not really real to him, because the potentials of the self and world are part of what reality is, and our gray fellow isn’t allowing himself to see them. For this unfortunate person, everything is surface. Presence, however, has depth. 

A second example is a person for whom the world consists basically of abstractions. Such a person lives in his head, cut off from sensual, emotional, and social experience. His intuition, his “feel” for how things are, may be stunted. He may even have only the most awkward of relationships with physical reality. Only this person’s concepts are “really real” to him, and perhaps not even those.  

Yet another instance is a person who adopts a false sense of life and makes her life a staged drama or comedy with the things around her as cardboard props and other people as just part of the scenery, lacking their own fully independent existence. “Reality” for her is basically a mirror reflecting her pretenses back at her.  

You could say that all of these people are experiencing a form of dissociation, but I would say that it is possible to dream one’s way through life without having a clinical problem. Call it “everyday dissociation.” I suppose it could be traced to faulty philosophical premises, such as mind-body dualism, but perhaps it is a simple lack of insight or even method. To make self and world seem “really real,” we need a special kind of mental focus, which is the subject of this essay. 

I don’t always feel my presence, but when I do, it’s an experience of hereness. Presence can feel like the soothing warmth of a hot shower or the brisk chill of autumn air or an earned sense of accomplishment or anything that makes you more aware of your being. This experience can be liberating, expansive, joyous, serene, or shocking. Even when you sit with grief, presence can sit quietly beside you. 

Hereness is how I experience the presence of myself, but the presence of the world can be here, near to me, or there, far from me. It can be the way the floor presses on my feet when I stand on it, the sunlight in my eyes, the sound of crickets, or even my cat.

A metaphor I sometimes use in discussing presence is “coalescence.” When you focus on presence, either voluntarily or through being startled, you take the “diffuse” molecules of your self and the world and pull them together into something solid, definite, and centered. This is what it means to be in mental focus. 

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Does my statement about presence at the top of the essay translate into anything beyond the unremarkable observation, “I exist, and I am conscious that the world exists”? At a basic level, you could say that that’s exactly what it translates into. But for my purposes “presence” means existence considered and experienced in a special light. You could say that “existence” is prose, while “presence” is poetry, replete with metaphors.   

We can build a bridge between the two perspectives. As linguist George Lakoff would point out, when we grope for abstractions, especially for the first time, we almost inevitably use metaphors, and these metaphors frequently form the etymological foundations of the words that represent the abstractions. The etymology of the concept “to exist” is a case in point. It is from the French exister (17c.), from Latin existere/exsistere "to step out, stand forth, emerge, appear; exist, be."  (Different sources have slightly different etymologies.) 

In terms of the metaphor on which the concept of existence was scaffolded, for something to exist it must step out and stand forth. In other words, it must assert itself. People literally assert themselves, but as I use the term, things like stones and trees assert themselves too: They exist whether we pay attention to them or not. They do not bend to mere will. They have their own “weight,” and they “push back” at us when we interact with them. They make “impressions” on us, and an impression is what you get when something presses into something.  And although things like light beams and pi have a kind of presence, entities with volume and mass are probably the paradigm of objects with presence.  

It is the experience of the self and world asserting themselves that I emphasize when I say presence. Presence is the “stone-ness” of things, although living beings are obviously more than mere rocks. It is close to what Ayn Rand (1905 - 1982) means by her axiomatic concept, “the primacy of existence,” but I am imbuing it with the poetry, with the feeling of being. 

“Presence” is not a technical term from philosophy. Although in my usage it has a literal meaning that we will soon investigate, it is, as I have noted, richer in connotations than such terms—again, more like poetry. To me it seems uncontroversial to say that there are some things in human experience that can be best expressed through art and poetry. The term presence, as I will soon define it, also exceeds the bare statement “I exist” in that it captures more specifically the kind of being a person is and what it is like, at a fundamental level, to be one. And just so with the existence of things in the world and what it is like to experience them.  

My hope is that I can help you feel your own presence and that of the world more intensely. I believe that experiencing presence can help make everyday life more special and that it can energize you and break out of the everyday dissociation that is a temptation to us all. Presence is part of the best life. My plea to you the reader is that you do not allow your presence to be smothered by the mundane when you could choose to assert it, as the torch asserts the flame. This is your birthright.  

All of this might sound good, but it is, admittedly, rather vague, perhaps nothing more than a collection of abstractions and pretty words. It is incumbent upon me to bring the idea of presence down to earth. I’m going to concentrate first on the presence of the self and then transition to the presence of the world.  

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In “The Tables Turned” Wordsworth famously wrote that “We murder to dissect.” Well, I am going to attempt to “dissect” presence--to break the poetry down into prose. Hopefully I can do so without murdering it. I liken such a process to good literary criticism: I will try to ensure that my analysis does not drain the experience of its wonder, while attempting to point the way to an appreciation of the phenomenon that is richer, precisely because it is more spelled out.  

I’ve spent thousands of words trying to capture what presence feels like before I was satisfied. Let’s begin at my end, with my formulation of presence as it applies to the self.  We will dive into the frigid waters of conceptual analysis and later warm ourselves at the fire of the presence rekindled by our renewed experience.  

Here is the formulation:  
  
My presence is my experience of an effortful, self-conscious realization of myself as a physical being.

If I were to simplify the formulation to make it more accessible, I would say that you feel your presence when you grasp your own self-awareness. But this is too simple and needs to be understood in more detailed terms. Please bear with me.   

The formulation has a lot of moving parts. I will explain and integrate them as we go. At the end, I will restate the formulation and discuss how the feeling of presence can be attained. 

The central feature of the formulation is that we are self-conscious or self-aware beings. That’s what makes presence bold and resonant.  

We do not, of course, always proceed in a self-aware manner. Sometimes we are lost in a task or daydreaming. Presence is a certain kind of focus on the self.  

Presence, however, is not navel-gazing. Yes, sometimes it takes a “pure” form somewhat like mindfulness meditation, but you can feel your presence while engaged in activities. When I was younger and rode a bicycle, cruising, pumping, coasting, riding next to my wife, all made me feel present if I paid attention to them. And woe unto me if I didn’t pay attention! (Although certain kinds of flow experiences can involve presence, too.) 

Of course, people can exist without feeling their presence, and I don’t just mean when they’re asleep. However, I would say that a person isn’t realizing their full potential except when they are present. A person can sleepwalk through their days, even though they are awake. I am not trying to dehumanize anyone by saying this, because I think presence is something everyone, even of modest intelligence, is capable of experiencing. 

The experience of presence does not just happen. It takes work. It is, as I say in the formulation, effortful. That work is the work of you exercising your free will. Free will, as Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Branden (1930 - 2014) identified it, lies in deliberately raising your level of consciousness, which they metaphorize as “focus.” To be clear, the object of this raising of consciousness need not be the self: it can consciousness of anything. However, when you experience presence, feeling the effort to raise your consciousness is part of what it means to feel self-conscious. You feel yourself “pushing.” 

What requires the effort is “realization.” That’s a pun. “Realize” in one sense means “to come to understand.” “Realize” in another sense means “to make real.” When you make the effort to attend to yourself deliberately, you are in a paradoxical loop, you are a self creating your own self. That’s what I mean by “coalesce.” Of course, one cannot enter the loop from complete unconsciousness, but the potential is there in any alert waking moment when one is not completely distracted by other matters. That’s what free will means. 

It may surprise some readers that I include physicality in the formulation. I suspect that is because when many people think of the self, they think of the Cartesian ego, an abstraction disconnected from the physical world and the body, just floating around in mental space. The ego in this sense feels the need to prove its own existence to itself. That’s the point of Descartes’ famous statement, “I think, therefore I am.” 

As I see it, presence is not part of a proof. There is no “therefore” in it. Although I can unpack the experience, hopefully fostering it in the process, it is, if one pays attention, wordlessly self-evident to anyone past the age when self-awareness comes into being.  

Presence needs to include physicality because the human self is bodily, i.e. inherently physical. You occupy space, you have mass, you are subject to gravity, heat, and many other physical forces. You share a world with other physical objects like trees and the food you eat and other people, which you apprehend by way of your physical senses, i.e. perception. You are among them, and they are your home.  And only a physical being can be alive.

What I am trying to do is to ground human life in the perceptual world, which is the reality that abstractions are based on. In fact, presence, as a practice, can be a means of addressing the dissociation that comes with dualism. For more about my theory of personal holism, see this essay.

This emphasis on physicality does not make me a materialist who reduces people to chemicals like those found in test tubes. Chemicals in certain formations can be said to be alive and conscious without appealing to some sort of vitalist spark. There are more things in the physical world than are dreamt about in your physics, Horatio. If a scientific theory cannot account for visible facts, then too bad for that theory. It’s back to the drawing board.  

Because we are beings whose awareness is grounded in our bodily nature, to be self-aware means to feel our sensations, our weight, our volume, etc.

Some readers might respond to my idea that presence requires the experience of physicality by saying that they could feel presence just by withdrawing into their thoughts, into something like one’s Cartesian pure consciousness, by quiet self-contemplation of the naked I. In my opinion, this is not what’s going on. Rather, one is focusing one’s attentions on one’s thoughts, and letting other, bodily parts of one’s experience slip into the background. They’re still there. 

When I include physicality in my definition of presence, I am most certainly not trying to strip feelings from human life: I feel love, pride, grief, and so forth, in my body. The emotional self is a bodily, and therefore physical, self.

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There are two books that have helped me understand presence, both in my writing and in my personal life: 

Your Body Knows the Answer, by David Rome, develops philosopher-therapist Eugene Gendlin’s idea of the “felt sense.” The felt sense is a kind of inchoate intuition felt in the body, like a gut feeling but often more subtle. Through a method called focusing, one can make this intuition explicit and put it into words. Rome adds to Gendlin’s ideas a dollop of (non-mystical) Buddhism. He describes a technique called GAP: Grounded, Aware, Present. Without going into all the details—I recommend the book in its totality—the technique makes one feel physically present as one’s body and in one’s surroundings. From there one can explore one’s emotional life.  

GAP can summon the experience of presence: “Grounded” means getting in touch with the feelings of your weight in your seat (although I usually concentrate on my feet on the floor.) “Aware” means quietly listening to the sounds around, such as the low sound of the refrigerator or the cars on the street, reaching out to your environment. “Present,” in Rome’s sense, means putting your hand over your heart and feeling the warm, living you (pp 30 – 31).  GAP helps me achieve personal presence along with, to some extent, the presence of things in the world. GAP is just the first exercise among many useful ones in the book. 

The second book is The Open-Focus Life by Les Fehmi, Susan Shor Fehmi, and Mark Beauregard. This book discusses styles of mental focus such as narrow, diffuse, objective, immersed, that we can shift between. Each has its advantages and disadvantages as the occasion arises. Modern Westerners are too often stuck in the narrow objective style of focus, which is good for intense problem solving, but which can be very stressful. 

Les Fehmi discovered another style of focus that allows one to fluidly shift between the others while transcending them. This style is called “open focus.” It is achieved by recognizing that everything in the world occupies space, including even thoughts, which occupy space in one’s head. One goes into open focus by imagining the space things occupy, both the spaces inside them and between them, including the body. This technique puts things in perspective and can help deal with pain and emotional distress. It even changes your brainwaves.

I’m not sure Fehmi intended his technique to be used this way, but I personally start by concentrating on the spaces between things more than within them in order to reveal them as “really real.” I look at the space inside my water bottle if it’s clear, the space between it and my computer, between it and me. It’s similar to the technique that is taught in art school of exploring the negative spaces. Then I turn to the positive spaces that things fill. This exercise accentuates the three-dimensional nature of the physical world, and the physical world is the starting point for both Rome and Fehmi, although they are not materialists any more than I am. 

But to be clear, being three-dimensional is not the only attribute of physical reality That was one of Descartes’ errors. I can also experience the presences of objects in the world by concentrating on their mass. I heft the water bottle. I push against the wall. I feel my feet pressing against the floor. Fehmi seems to emphasize the visual, while Rome emphasizes mass, but this is probably an over-simplification. In any case, the full experience of presence requires both. 

However, I wouldn’t want to exclude other, crucial sensory qualities such as color, scent, or tone, but I think the fundamental qualities as far at the experience of presence goes are mass and three-dimensionality, including one’s own.

Since I have unpacked it, I will restate the formulation of the presence of the self:

My presence is my experience of an effortful, self-conscious realization of myself as a physical being.

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 Now that we have, so to speak, fleshed out the experience of the presence of the self, I think we are ready for a formulation of the presence of things in the world: 
 
The presence of things in the world is the experience of objective, physical existents we are immersed in, achieved by an effortful, self-conscious exploration of them.

Again, to make the formulation more accessible for the moment I would say that you feel the presence of things in the world when you are self-conscious about their independent existence. But we still have to spell it out.

The key concept is “objective existents.” To be objective is to have an existence that is separate from anyone’s consciousness of it. In other words, to be objective is to be “self-sufficient.”  

That doesn’t mean objective existents have no effects. They affect our sense organs and brain a certain way so that we are conscious of them. But their nature is not affected by the nature of our mental constitution pure and simple. We need not be simpleminded about this and engage in “naive realism,” which is the theory that things exist exactly in the form we perceive them.

Consider the old question “If a tree falls in the woods and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?” The answer to that is No, what it makes are vibrations in the air. But if and when the vibrations reach an ear, the nature of the ear and brain lead them be perceived as sound. Sounds are the form in which we perceive vibrations of a certain size. Only existents that affect human beings can be said to have presence, although those that don’t are no less real.  

Just to be clear about the attributes of objective existents, let’s make a list of them: 

• Objective existents do not depend on consciousness for their existence 

• They exist even when no one is paying attention to them, although not necessarily in the form in which we perceive them 

• They do not bend to mere will 

• Physical entities with volume and mass are fundamental for the experience of presence, although they are not all that exist 

• We can only affect physical entities by our physical motion 

• We know them by the effects they have on us 

• They are the quintessential “other” 

Effortful exploration is key to experiencing the presence of things. There is no such thing as passive knowledge. We need to raise our level of consciousness. We need to move around literally and figuratively and touch things: I don’t really know a tree unless I see it from a distance and close up and touch its bark and leaves. Vision, perspective, and touch depend on each other to get a complete awareness of things in the world.  (Of course, the non-entitative senses count, too.) The feeling of effort of this exploration is part of the push-back of assertive reality.

“I am present among the things of the world, and they are present to me” also contains the idea of being “immersed” in the world. This is metaphorical. What I mean is that, when we assert ourselves by existing, we assert ourselves by being in the world, moving through our environment. This is true when we work in the kitchen and when we drive our car. We touch the world, and it touches us. We are not minds watching mental representations of the world—the world is right here, and we are in it.   

What we are immersed in is a world of other things and persons. We are not all that exists. Other things and persons are just as real as we are. “Otherness” is an essential aspect of the presence of things in the world. That boulder over there is not us, and our experience of its presence is heightened by its separate existence because we can push on it and it can push back, giving us a feeling of its assertion.  

Paradoxically, the bodily self must be centered and de-centered at the same time, albeit in different respects: centered because we are what philosopher Edmund Husserl called the “zero point,” meaning that the location of objects is known in relation to the physical self, and de-centered because when we reach a certain degree of sophistication, we realize that we must adopt something like what philosopher Thomas Nagel called a “view from nowhere” with the physical self not being privileged.  For example, I may perceive a room to be around me, while perceiving the room to be its own objective place in which I happen to be. This may be the subject for another essay, but I think there is great power in being able to hold both perspectives at the same time, which is what I think Nagel is trying to do.    

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Understanding presence is not a sterile intellectual exercise, but a profound participation with everything that is going on within ourselves and the world, although it can be intellectually exciting to explore. Fundamentally, understanding presence is only a means to an end.

The end is to live presence, to feel and breathe presence: To feel your volume and your mass and your breath and your consciousness suffuse your whole person. You grab a stone and you drink water. To exist and be real in a world of things that exist and are real, including even abstractions if they are organizations of conscious, physical reality, as they must be in order to be valid. Presence isn’t always joyous, but as long as blood flows through your veins and your brain reasons, presence means life.   

In my own case, I know that when I sit and think I feel my posture and breathing in the background. They are the hum of my living self. I would be wary of any thought that did not have a physical component, which, for example, would include intuitions as I feel them in my body. Pure “head thinking,” except in emergencies, is, in my estimation, partial, even dangerous. This is Fehmi’s point about narrow objective focus being stressful. 

I’m no expert about meditation, but I gather that in many forms of it, one focuses on one’s breath. Breath is perhaps the fundamental experience of our physical nature since it is at our bodily core, it is crucial to living, and it is both voluntary and involuntary. One should not always be thinking about breathing of course, but doing so as necessary might bring one back into the experience of presence, which is often disrupted by the rapid or shallow breathing of anxiety.   

In creating presence, you are not creating the world as God did in the old stories, but rather you choose to focus your attention on yourself and the things in the world, opting to reach out to their being and to coalesce the diffuse molecules of awareness into the realized potential of your self and the things around you. This process can take place on a dance floor or in a lover’s embrace, but for me personally it most saliently occurs as the autumn breeze rustles the scented leaves and plays gently on my cheek as I walk and converse with my wife. I choose to be here.    

“I am present among the things of the world, and they are present to me” means: 

My presence is my experience of the effortful, self-conscious realization of myself as a physical being, while the presence of things in the world is the experience of objective, physical existents we are immersed in, achieved by an effortful, self-conscious exploration of them. 

I hope my dissection hasn’t murdered the poetry of presence. 

Please think about the original statement, my “credo;” let it seep into you. Try saying it: I am present among the things of the world, and they are present to me. You can use it to foreground different aspects of your own presence as you touch them. Feel your physicality. Use all of your ways of knowing. Move in a world that is immediately at hand. Get excited by your job. Touch grass. Don’t engage in dissociation. Be here where you are.  

There is so much more to be said about presence! It is, in a way, the pilot light for human life. Maybe I feel that way because the experience of presence is the experience I myself need most, since I have dissociative personality tendencies, but I think that many people have some tendency to sleepwalk or dream through their lives, and a greater experience of presence would be beneficial to them. Isn’t a more vivid existence desirable to almost everyone? 

And so important too is the presence of other conscious beings. When you and I look into each other’s eyes with our guard down and no intention of using each other, we each peer into a deep well of presence. No doubt I’ll have to write about this in the future.  

I don’t want this essay to end. I hope it has brought some degree of enlightenment to you, whether new or renewed, as writing it has brought to me. Whether we ever meet or not, we are present here together.