The Secret of Deep Presence

When I teach meditation, I describe it as the practice of conscious contentment: choosing to be content with whatever our experience happens to be. I want to emphasize that I am not talking about resignation. Resignation means tolerating what is because we believe there is nothing we can do about it.

Conscious contentment is something entirely different. It is genuine contentment with the way things are, no matter how they are. It is the capacity to remain at peace with anything, for as long as it lasts. Such infinite contentment is only possible when we discover a source of contentment that exists prior to every circumstance, every thought, and every experience.

Most of us are not yet able to rest in that infinite contentment, so we search for the deepest ground of our being. We search through the practice of deep presence.

Deep presence means resting in the awareness that exists before everything else. It is pure awareness before there is anything to be aware of. I have often referred to this as the awareness that is aware, and I have long believed it to be the key to genuine inner freedom.

Recently, I have been reflecting on an idea shared by my friend Dr. Timothy Morton of Rice University. He suggests that one of the most transformative aspects of consciousness is that our experience of reality always occurs a fraction of a second after our actual encounter with it. Between contact and experience lies a subtle gap, and within that gap resides an extraordinary possibility.

Our minds require a tiny but finite amount of time to construct an experience from whatever we encounter. During that brief interval, reality has already touched us, but our interpretation of it has not yet formed. The encounter is real, but it has not yet become a story, a judgment, or even an experience we can describe.

This strikes me as a beautiful way of understanding deep presence. In meditation we learn to rest in that gap of not knowing. There we are free from the mental constructions that ordinarily define our experience, and we begin to sense the exhilaration of infinite possibility. The longer we rest in that space between contact and interpretation, the more fascinating it becomes.

In that gap we discover the mystery of being itself. It is alive, open, and unlimited, the living source from which every experience emerges before thought has shaped it into something familiar. We can learn to place our attention there and simply rest. As we do, we become infused with a joy that does not depend upon circumstances.

When we are established in this depth of being, it becomes surprisingly easy to be content with whatever unfolds afterward. This, I believe, is the secret of infinite contentment.