When we allow ourselves to simply rest at the heart – simply rest – relaxing all other phenomena of mind and emotion, what remains is a conscious loving presence. It is our default position. We needn't be squeamish, nor cynical, nor sentimental, about resting at the heart. It is the simple human gesture that obviates both our worldly wisdom and our worldly distress. The heart, we will see, is more than we think.

When we turn our attention to the heart, and rest there, we are creating a resonance circuit between the heart and the prefrontal cortex of the brain. This restores us to our organic capacity for presence, which resumes in the absence of our reactive or separative stories. It is important to take a moment to feel that, to reconnect with this resonant sense even for a second, to kindle our inner knowledge of its truth.

Perhaps it is not so easy to rest at the heart. And the obstacles to that constitute our human story. The mind is quick to move on to all its “necessary distractions”. And even when we rest there – momentarily or longer – we still may not be fully cognizant of our own experience. We may not fully turn our attention to the actual experience of the moment. But if we rest, if we rest our attention, if we allow that emerging and subjective moment of the heart to percolate into our awareness, without distraction and without prejudice, we will discover our own field of conscious loving presence. It is always the field on which we walk.

Gandhi said that history is a record of the interruptions in the steady flow of love. When there is just love, or the loving care-taking that constitutes much of our human activity, there is no history. There is only reciprocity with the moment, which is not recorded as history. When there is interruption trauma (which may also be constant) – invasions, uprooting, greed, conquest, battles or manipulation for hierarchy and power over each other, destruction, deprivations, and depredations of the human spirit – these we record as the storyline of history. A history that keeps history going. The sage Gurdjieff once said that our recorded history is not the true human history; it is merely the history of crime: crimes against our conscious loving presence. Whereas our hidden, or spiritual, history records out attempts to be true to conscious loving presence.

We are born as heartfields into the surrounding heartfield. They are tied to our neural empathy circuits. (We will speak more of 'heartfields' in a while.) But ours is a heartfield already interrupted by 'history;' or, we can say, by culture, which is the carrier of all our human aspirations, trauma, and conditioning over time. The radiant or expressive self of our conscious loving presence naturally acquires a working self identity (ego) to allow us to develop appropriate boundaries for navigating the apparent material world of duality. As such, that ego self need not be distant from its own heartfield. But the ego evolves as strategy and story in response to the early breakdowns of reciprocity and the perceived absences of conscious loving presence. Attempting to hold our world together safely and sensibly, we develop compelling histories and fixations of experience as a record of the interruptions in the flow of love. I sometimes refer to these as our acquired “f-l-i-n-c-h” pattern or flinch profile; that is, our entirely understandable failure to love into the next conscious happening. We have learned different patterns of flinching away from experience, and flinching away from relationship, which also leaves us flinching away from the field of conscious loving presence. The wide open field of reciprocity is naturally modified by defenses to that reciprocity. Our profound innate receptivity to experience is modified by the accumulate strategies, concepts, projections, and categories of our evolving storyline and mental processing.

Presence is the natural state. Presence is not quite the same as our everyday “being present,” which implies someone to be present, to pay attention. Thus, it is not only mindfulness, which implies someone in the act of being mindful. Presence is what all of this already is. Presence is empty – because it is not a thing; and is not taken up by discrete things. Presence doesn't exclude anything either. It is the only being of everything. It is all-inclusive emptiness. When we speak like this, it may seem to us very paradoxical – or abstract – or esoteric. But that is only because we don't recognize our own presence.

As we begin to spend more time and attention just being present – which in the beginning may be a task – we may start to notice that being present begins to feel a certain way. That empty and open space of simple availability may be characterized by a growing palpable sense of awareness, warmth, appreciation, heartfulness, coherence and resonance that together we may begin to recognize and feel as a sense of presence. This sense of presence may grow in us, holding and infusing all our experience; and it may even begin to feel infinite or unbounded, all pervading and all transcending. That is why the word Presence is a quality traditionally attributed to the Divine. At the same time, we begin to experience it as our own underlying nature.

Presence is not inert. It is awake being. But our awakeness, we shall see, is usually distracted and identified with our array of thoughts and concepts. Thus I may be asleep to my own Presence, except as a virtual idea of me. We don't have to reject thoughts in order to awaken to presence. We merely have to shift attention to Presence. Thoughts are the content. Presence is always the context, the truth of our aware being. So we can return to Presence right now, again and again. Each time we recognize Presence, it is easier to recognize it again. Each time we relax as Presence, it is more natural to continue as Presence. We see that when we rest as Presence we are both awake and empty, or open. Because we are awake and empty, we are the spaciousness that reflects and includes everything as it is.

So we can see how awareness and presence partake inseparably of each other. We only experience presence by being aware of it. We only experience awareness by being present for it. One without the other would be somewhat meaningless. Thus they are in one sense the same, and yet also different. They are different aspects of the same thing.

Just as we are always present, but not always present for our presence (presence can be asleep to itself), so we are always aware, but not always aware of it (awareness can be asleep to itself and asleep to presence). We could say awareness is lost in all our thoughts, images, dreams and stories, and yet it is still aware, or else we wouldn't have thought, images and stories. Yet we can say our awareness is not free awareness. It is captured by our thoughts, etc., and no longer experiences itself to be other than them. It does not experience itself to be the awake nature of presence.

Identification, Intimacy, Reciprocity, and Responsiveness

Awareness surrenders and forgets itself through the process of identification. It seemingly becomes one with the object of awareness, but is no longer alive to its own nature, awake to its own presence. We can say that identification is the mode awareness takes when it is divorced from presence. By contrast, intimacy is the mode awareness take when it is one with presence. Awareness is open and intimate with the moment. It can still engage images and thoughts, but they no longer pull awareness away from being present.

Identification and intimacy offer two very different models or understandings of “oneness.”

The oneness of identification is a one-dimensional, or, we could say, virtual oneness, in that is, by definition, identification with our virtual models of reality as they structure our relative experiences, feelings or projections. This includes all the virtual experiences, the introjections and projections, and the labels by which we define ourselves and others, and the images that reinforce our egoic, or separative, self-sense.

The oneness of intimacy is the oneness of the freedom of all things to be whatever they are – not subject to our conceptions and projections – while participating in a shared presence that we ourselves are aware of and present for; and in which they are ever-fresh in our experience with new and ever- deepening dimensions of presence. This sense of a fundamental or profound intimacy is also at the heart of our deepest spiritual understanding of reality. In this sense, our deepening experiences of contemplation, meditation, or prayer – as well as our deepest relational experiences with others, are all journeys in intimacy. I can only be identified with my own projections of reality. I can only be intimate with the immediacy of things as they are.

Our relationship to everything is a mystery, because nothing is separate or exclusive of that one same being, or presence. The apparent arising of things in our experience, the apparent arising of otherness, is an intimate part of our collective nature as Presence. Our opportunity for relationship to “another” is a privileged part of what we are together as one Presence. Presence can recognize Presence in every relationship. Thus intimacy is the doorway into the full recognition of Being. Identification short circuits that recognition.

The recognition of each other at the level of presence is what we call essential reciprocity. Essential reciprocity is to receive and be received by another at the level of being. We are recognized and received by each other as we are, both in our human particularities and in the growing revelation of our essential nature. In true reciprocity, we are received and recognized by each other without the screen of our separate motivations, prejudices, or emotional or conceptual schemas that distort our responsive- ness. In human relationships, this leads to the most creative, functional, and appropriate mutual behaviors. Whereas my identifications dictate my reactivity, true reciprocity leads to true responsiveness. Responsiveness is our nature and capacity to respond to another with recognition, respect, playfulness, intimacy, and mutual service and support. It is a play of the universal nature of responsive being, at one with awareness and presence. It is love. Thus presence manifests as reciprocity manifests as responsiveness. All are actual expressions of the mystery of one all-inclusive responsive Being, or Presence.

Just as my essential awareness is preoccupied and identified with relative concepts and stories; and my essential presence is identified with a relative and separative story of myself, or ego -- so my essential caring or loving is identified with a range of reactive emotions that might not look like love at all. Along with my presence and my awareness, my loving is equally a reflection of my underlying wholeness of being. However, it, too, is now identified with my relative stories about relative conditions; and love's energy and responsiveness is expressed in the full spectrum of reactive emotion – feeling good, feeling bad, feeling anger or hate, feeling craving, or even needing to dull down or avoid my feelings. And yet, if I didn't have the fundamental quality of responsive caring in me, I wouldn't need to express this caring in all kinds of relative and reactive, even negative, ways.

If my awareness and sense of presence were not conditional – tied to my relative images and stories – then my caring would also not be conditional, tied to my attachments and to my stories about how things are. Is the world safe or not safe; are things going well for me or not; do others love me or not; do I approve of my own self and my own feelings or not. If my awareness and my presence were not identified with relative images, I would experience the underlying or inherent wholeness of my experience -- and the warmth, intimacy, and completeness of my true presence. This wholeness is our fundamental happiness, the ultimate reference point for our happiness, the fundamental happiness we desire and seek. And so that fundamental happiness naturally participates in the fullness and wholeness of being, naturally affirming and upholding all being as a shared presence. And that is the fundamental or unconditional love that is also what we are.

While we are still caught, consciously or unconsciously, in our identifications and attachments, that love may become exuberant at times – when conditions warrant – or is as likely to take a reactive form, craving, jealous, angry or resentful, hateful; even discouraged or depressed, so that at times it even appears flat or non-existent. But now, as we begin to discern, allow, and rest in our underlying presence; and discern and reawaken to our underlying awareness; as we learn to relax and surrender into the fullness of this growing state of presence, we begin to experience, in place of our reactive feelings, a growing sense of warmth and heartfulness that is characterized by our genuine caring. This genuine caring arises as warmth, appreciation, affection, gratitude, compassion, love, and a genuine support for ourselves and others. And this love is not separate from the nature of our own awareness and the nature of our own presence. We are, in fact, by nature, conscious loving presence.

As such, the fullness of love comes to be aware of itself, and awareness comes to experience itself as love; and they manifest as the one delight of selfless being. This is the play, or field, of conscious loving presence that is ever giving birth to the universe of our experience. Ultimately, we come to see that what underlies our experience in the field – and drives us at the deepest level of our being, even through all the distortions of our perceiving – is the desire for our true nature to come to rest in itself. This is for presence to experience itself as that Presence which is also loving awareness; for awareness to experience itself as that Awareness which is also loving presence; and for love to experience itself as that Love which is also an unconditional aware presence. Thus they are all one and the same field, the field of what we are fundamentally, that expresses the qualities we often think of as “divine,” and which simply open or close in our experience according to our recognition of the field.

A fundamental Buddhist teaching is that reality is empty, or spacious, in essence; awake, or conscious, by nature; and all-responsive in capacity. It is the dance of Presence – Empty, Awake, Responsive Presence – in which Oneness knows itself as Other, and Otherness recognizes itself as One. This is because, truly speaking, there is neither a oneness nor an otherness, but rather a womb of being whose essential or inherent intimacy and conscious loving presence expresses itself in all the dimensions of self and other. There is not a one or a two being intimate. There is only inherent intimacy itself, an infinitely superpositional quantum field in playful flux, the dharmadatu, the godhead, the trinity. Its truth is expressed right now as what we are.

If we can understand this truth at a practical human level, it tells us much of what we need to know about ourselves and our relationships. It tells us what we need to know about intimacy, parenting, communication, and human development: how we can foster and honor in each other awake presence and fullness of being in all its individuality of expression, beyond the limitations of personal, cultural or historical conditioning. We learn to recognize this essential Presence. And we learn from what obstructs it. And as we devote heart and mind to this learning, we discover increasingly that we can choose to persist as embracing and responsive love despite all evidence to the contrary. Thus we participate in this blossoming of human possibility that we call The Blessing Way.