Inner Work

For the week of October 27, 2008

The Continuous Choice

So much of our life goes by habit and momentum: habits of body, habits of thought, habits of emotion. In itself, our ability to learn actions and repeat them with little cognitive effort is remarkably useful and powerful. Such autopilot-driven, habitual actions work by the automatic energy. Our will may enter, perhaps minimally, in choosing to initiate a habitual process, like deciding what to eat. But then the eating proceeds by momentum. We may choose where to walk, but the walking goes by auto-pilot. We may choose the topic of conversation, but the talking just happens.

Habits and momentum offer a necessary simplification of our life. But our presence tends to remain submerged beneath any habitual action. We are hardly aware of what we are doing in those moments. Time lives us. We lose a part of our life if we do not live it ourselves, if we are not here, aware, and present.

Sensing our inner body brings us to the threshold of presence. Full presence though, requires the moment-to-moment continuing choice to be here, to be in contact with your sensory experience, with your body, with your mind and emotions, with your awareness itself. But primarily presence means to be your self, to be the one who is here and aware, to be the one chooses what you choose, the one who does what you do, the one who lives your life.

To really live, and not to be lived by our habitual responses to the exigencies of time, we need to live in presence. The choice to be present must be made again and again, because we always fall back, abdicating ourselves to habits of body, mind, and emotion, collapsing into our personality, our preprogrammed patterns and responses to the sensory stream.

The choice to be present not only needs repeating, but also extending so that it lasts longer in time, as “I enter the here and now, and I stay here and now.” And what I do, comes from me. I feel that I am doing whatever I do, saying what I say, experiencing what I experience.

The continuous choice to be present is continuous in the sense of being frequent and also in the sense of being ongoing in a given series of moments. The frequent choice is how we take the opportunity to awaken and the ongoing choice is how we turn that opportunity into a stability of presence that can survive more that a few seconds. “Here I am and here I stay.” This is a dynamic continuity, not static. Our presence flows through us like a river of will into the ocean of time, and keeps flowing as long as we choose to be.

We need not stop our habits. Indeed we could hardly live without them. But we open to a deeper and parallel layer of being and action, where we enter any experience with presence, even an experience of one of our habitual or preprogrammed patterns. We enter direct contact with our experience, whatever it is at the moment. We always have a body, so we can always start by being in contact with our body through sensation. We make that continuous choice to enter and to stay here, in our body and in presence. And instead of time living us, we live in the eternal present.

About Inner Frontier                                    Send us email 

Copyright © 2001-2024 Joseph Naft. All rights reserved.