Presence as Distinct from Present

“Be present” is a common admonition these days. Eckhart Tolle became famous for his book The Power of Now, which is about being present in the here and now. The idea is to let go of our obsession with the past and future, neither of which actually exist in this moment.

I just read a twist on this concept that I really like. In the book The Spell of the Sensuous, author David Abram writes about the difference between ‘present’ and ‘presence.’  

In my mind, ‘being present’ meant that you somehow managed to step outside the flow of time. But as I read Mr. Abram’s discussion I realized that when you are ‘in the present’ you are, in fact, still in time. You are in this moment of ‘now,’ and then that now, and then that now.

Presence, on the other hand, is about just being. When you are in presence you are not aware of time at all. You are so involved in what you are doing that time becomes meaningless. Most of us have experienced this many times—those blissful moments of play when you lose yourself like a child to the game, or in lovemaking that envelops you in the sensuousness of your body, or while creating art—when you come out of that experience of presence hours may have passed and it feels like minutes.

This is what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls the experience of ‘Flow.’ (This is a link to his TED talk on Flow.)

As I thought about this, it seemed to me that ‘present’ has the feeling of a static state, while ‘presence’ is dynamic, is experience, is being.

Mr. Abram took this concept of presence from Martin Heidegger and his book Time and Being. This is a quote from Heidegger:

Obviously, time is not nothing. Accordingly, we maintain caution and say: there is time. We become still more cautious, and look carefully at that which shows itself as time, by looking ahead to Being in the sense of presence, the present. However, the present in the sense of presence differs so vastly from the present in the sense of the now…[T]he present as presence and everything which belongs to such a present would have to be called real time, even though there is nothing immediately about it of time as time is usually represented in the sense of a succession of a calculable sequence of nows.

Me in presence on yesterday's hike

The Three Meanings of Present

Many Eastern spiritual traditions teach the wisdom of being present in every moment of now. This principle was brought to the attention of Westerners in the 1960s through Ram Dass’s classic Be Here Now, and more recently with Eckhart Tolle’s bestseller The Power of Now.

Recently I was contemplating the meaning of "present," and I realized it has three meanings: "here" (when the teacher calls your name you reply, "present!"), "now" (an event occurs in the present), and "gift" (“here’s your birthday present!”).

What I like about this trinity of meanings is that being present means more than “being here now”; being present also means embracing what is as a gift.

When I was in high school I used to make a calendar in the last few months of school and took delight in crossing off every day until the last day of school. One day I realized how crazy this attitude was—I’m celebrating getting a day over with? As if a day is something to endure? What is life except the collection of innumerable days just like this one, filled with a mixture of positives and negatives?

A beloved cat, Fluffles, helped me learn this lesson. At one point in my life she and I would wake up every morning in bed together. Every day the first thing I would become aware of was the sound of her purring, and it communicated to me, “I’m happy that we have another day to live and to love each other.” Yes I finally realized, that’s the way to live. Not seeing life as an endurance test but as a gift!

The gift of presence has another meaning also. Werner Erhard (founder of est) once said, "The greatest gift you can give another is just to be with them."

As I have learned to be more present, I have seen how true Mr. Erhard’s insight is: when you are present with another, they often open up like a flower. Presence is like a calming wave flowing through you, and other people can relax in its wake.