Ep. 137 – The Art of Resting in Presence

Resting in presence means And what is presence? From a theistic standpoint, you could say presence is God.

From a standpoint of Tibetan Dzogchen, it's Rigpa.

Presence, that ineffable sense of profound spaciousness, connectedness, love.

It's experienced, obviously, in different ways.

The Bible talks about pray without ceasing.

And Presence is something we can talk about, we can study, we can think about, but clearly it's a heart experience.

It's experienced from the heart.

How can we rest there? I remember when I was, many years ago, and I was still doing a lot of Buddhist meditation retreats, I went in to see my lama for an interview, Soknyi Rinpoche, at one of these Dzogchen retreats.

And he said, you've recognized Rigpa.

You've recognized presence.

Now your job is to stabilize it.

And I would guess that for almost everybody in the room, you have recognized Rigpa.

You have felt God.

You have had these moments where where you're out in nature or you're meditating or you're with your pet or you're just looking at the tree and there it is.

But how can we begin to stabilize that? How can we begin to pray without ceasing as it talks about in the Bible? For many people, and I'm thinking of, let me take a look, is Jim Forbes here today? He often comes, he's not here, he usually comes late.

Anyway, he often says, in fact, he's a Vipassana teacher himself, and he says that it usually takes most of an hour-long meditation session to get to the point where his mind calms down and he feels that sense of spaciousness.

And I would like to suggest that you don't have to wait for an hour, that you don't have to wait for the mind to calm down, that presence is always present.

Presence with a capital P.

Presence is here whether the mind is calm or not.

It's certainly easier to recognize when the mind is calm.

Presence is here whether you feel neurotic or not, whether you feel inadequate or not, whether you're happy or not.

In a way, recognizing presence is the function of the guru.

That here is this being or this quality of consciousness, this manifestation of consciousness that is radiating the fact that presence is always here, completely independent of what it is we're experiencing.

When people are exhausted, it's because they're being preoccupied with the content of experience.

And yes, the content of experience changes.