presence. Instead of focusing the light of your awareness like a laser on a particular object or activity, you open it like the sky, welcoming the experiences that arise just as the sky welcomes the clouds, neither ignoring nor indulging them. Instead of concentrating, you relax and let go, allowing everything to be just as it is, without any attempt to control on your part. You’re alert but at ease, totally present but not fixated in any way. As Ramana suggests, you can’t fabricate presence because it is what you are; you can only step aside and let it happen. Any effort is an indication that your mind has intervened. You may find this practice confusing and uncomfortable at first, because your mind is more accustomed to concentrating and holding on, which anchors it securely in the realm of the known, than to relaxing and letting go, which opens it to the unfamiliar and possibly frightening prospect of the unknown.
My Advaita teacher Jean Klein, who was a classically trained violinist, likened presence to the function of listening. When you listen, your awareness is naturally global, expansive, and receptive; the mind doesn’t tend to focus or fixate on sounds the way it does on visual objects, but rather opens to what is without picking and choosing. “Just open to the openness,” Jean was fond of saying. This quality of complete openness and receptivity is of the same nature as consciousness itself, which welcomes what is without resistanceor preferences. Eventually, presence ceases being a practice, something you do, and naturally dissolves in consciousness, unconditional presence, without a separate someone being present. “It is like being alone in the desert,” said Jean. “At first, you listen to the absence of sounds and call it silence. Then suddenly you may be taken by the presence of stillness where you are one with listening itself.” The realization that the separate someone doesn’t exist marks the ultimate fruition of the practice of presence. “In your absence is your presence,” Jean often observed.
Of course, the Buddhist practice of mindfulness is intended to lead to the same realization, but it can instead reinforce the subtle control of the mind. One friend, a long-time Zen student and a teacher of the Alexander technique (a refined approach to posture and breathing), recently suggested that the original purpose of the core Buddhist practice, mindfulness of the breath, was to bring you to the point where you let go and realize that you don’t breathe, you’re actually breathed—that is, there’s only breathing, with no separate someone breathing. In the words of Suzuki Roshi, the “I” is “just a swinging door that moves when we inhale and when we exhale.” In reality, however, the practice of mindfulness often turns into a kind of contest to see how “mindful” the separate someone can be.
TO MEDITATE OR NOT TO MEDITATE
Throughout the history of the direct approach, including the traditions of Zen, Dzogchen, and Advaita Vedanta, people have argued about the relative merits of meditation. At oneend of the spectrum are those who insist that you’re already a perfect expression of your radiant, essential nature just as you are, and any deliberate attempt to meditate separates you from what you’ve always been, reinforcing the illusion of a goal to be achieved and a someone who meditates. At the other end are those who contend that, even though you’re perfect and complete just as you are, you need to meditate to realize this fact. (For more on this paradox, see Chapter 1 .) Nowadays, many hardcore Advaitists believe that practices of any kind are antithetical to realization because they constellate a doer that doesn’t really exist. By contrast, many devoted Zen practitioners consider regular meditation practice to be a prerequisite for enlightenment.
Perhaps the most famous expression of this age-old debate can be found in the story of the Sixth Patriarch of Chinese Zen,
My Advaita teacher Jean Klein, who was a classically trained violinist, likened presence to the function of listening. When you listen, your awareness is naturally global, expansive, and receptive; the mind doesn’t tend to focus or fixate on sounds the way it does on visual objects, but rather opens to what is without picking and choosing. “Just open to the openness,” Jean was fond of saying. This quality of complete openness and receptivity is of the same nature as consciousness itself, which welcomes what is without resistanceor preferences. Eventually, presence ceases being a practice, something you do, and naturally dissolves in consciousness, unconditional presence, without a separate someone being present. “It is like being alone in the desert,” said Jean. “At first, you listen to the absence of sounds and call it silence. Then suddenly you may be taken by the presence of stillness where you are one with listening itself.” The realization that the separate someone doesn’t exist marks the ultimate fruition of the practice of presence. “In your absence is your presence,” Jean often observed.
Of course, the Buddhist practice of mindfulness is intended to lead to the same realization, but it can instead reinforce the subtle control of the mind. One friend, a long-time Zen student and a teacher of the Alexander technique (a refined approach to posture and breathing), recently suggested that the original purpose of the core Buddhist practice, mindfulness of the breath, was to bring you to the point where you let go and realize that you don’t breathe, you’re actually breathed—that is, there’s only breathing, with no separate someone breathing. In the words of Suzuki Roshi, the “I” is “just a swinging door that moves when we inhale and when we exhale.” In reality, however, the practice of mindfulness often turns into a kind of contest to see how “mindful” the separate someone can be.
TO MEDITATE OR NOT TO MEDITATE
Throughout the history of the direct approach, including the traditions of Zen, Dzogchen, and Advaita Vedanta, people have argued about the relative merits of meditation. At oneend of the spectrum are those who insist that you’re already a perfect expression of your radiant, essential nature just as you are, and any deliberate attempt to meditate separates you from what you’ve always been, reinforcing the illusion of a goal to be achieved and a someone who meditates. At the other end are those who contend that, even though you’re perfect and complete just as you are, you need to meditate to realize this fact. (For more on this paradox, see Chapter 1 .) Nowadays, many hardcore Advaitists believe that practices of any kind are antithetical to realization because they constellate a doer that doesn’t really exist. By contrast, many devoted Zen practitioners consider regular meditation practice to be a prerequisite for enlightenment.
Perhaps the most famous expression of this age-old debate can be found in the story of the Sixth Patriarch of Chinese Zen,
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