The practice of being pleasure is for you if you want life to be real.
You probably have a low tolerance for people who are out to lunch, oblivious, just not all there when you try to communicate with them or get something done. Presence is what they lack; it's as if they're not even there. That's you: you're not all here. Your life feels empty because you're not present. Presence is what makes life real.
If you're present, you experience the fact that you exist; you feel real to yourself, moment to moment, day to day. If that sentence speaks to you, if it calls out to the part of you that's dissatisfied with life, then maybe you really are ready for the practice of being pleasure. If that sentence resonates in you, I may be able to help. If not, that's OK; it doesn't mean you're less developed, just that this is probably not your path, at least not yet. The practice of being pleasure is not for everyone.
God is present in all beings. In nature, the presence of God is obvious to anyone who will look; God shines through nature very visibly, and this shining is invaluable to you as you begin the practice of presence. In humans, the presence of God is hidden, because humans are incomplete. God is just as present in humans as in other beings, but in humans God's presence is hidden because of our incompleteness and need to develop. Development and becoming make up the process of preparing yourself to let God's presence in you shine through.
As you develop, you steadily move in the direction of being able to experience the presence of God in you, and to let God's presence shine through you. The experience of the presence of God is the goal of all spiritual paths. The starting point is the universal comfort of God's presence all around you; the end point is experiencing God's presence in you. The experience of God's presence is beyond development and beyond becoming. When you experience the presence of God, you're no longer interested in the particular manifestation of God that is you, you're just interested in shining. You're not here for your own benefit, you're here to do a job for God, to shine. As it happens, the training and preparation for doing that job - development and then becoming - is what you want more than anything, but once you're prepared and trained it's not about you anymore. However, you won't mind. I can assure you of that. Telling the truth - letting God shine through you - will far surpass any delight or satisfaction you could experience as just you.
Your experience of the presence of God doesn't begin until you've made some progress with the later stages of becoming. At a certain point, fairly early in the later stages, you begin to become aware of the possibility of presence because you've surrendered to God enough that the presence of God in you starts to shake things up. You start to feel the hunger for the presence of God, which you couldn't feel before. People with no current possibility of experiencing the presence of God don't feel the hunger, because feeling the hunger for God's presence and not being able to do anything about it would be devastating beyond any other possible experience. God is merciful. Once you've begun surrendering to God in you, and have begun to feel the hunger for the presence of God, that hunger becomes more compelling than anything you've ever experienced before. It makes you dissatisfied with your life, and willing to do anything to satisfy the hunger. Having that hunger can also make it hard for you to bear those who don't have it, i.e. everyone around you.
The practice of the presence of God moves you from development and becoming into the work you're here to do - letting the truth of God shine through you. The stages you've gone through previously are just preparation for the practice of presence, which in turn is preparation for you to begin doing what you're here to do. For its starting point, the practice of presence requires not just development, your process of inhabiting being more fully, but becoming in the full sense of being becoming more of itself. Becoming takes place within the particular manifestation of God that you are; the practice of the presence of God and what that prepares you for - telling the truth, letting God shine through you - transcend any particular manifestation of God. Truth is universal.
The work of becoming is purely internal in a more profound way than any previous work. Once you've inhabited being, external information can have no possible relevance; only being can grasp and initiate the work required for being to become fuller and deeper. Only the direct guidance of God in you is relevant to becoming.
The work of becoming begins at a certain point in the later stages of development when you've occupied being fully enough. The practice of the presence of God and what that prepares you for transcend the work of becoming, but do not displace it. You do not stop being a particular manifestation of God, and you continue to become within that particularity. The particular work of becoming continues, and has a connection with the universal work of telling the truth; becoming lets the truth shine more brightly. The particularity doesn't color or inflect the truth, but becoming makes it possible for you to bear and transmit more of the truth.
In the old days, only special senior students whom the master had blessed even got to hear about the practice of the presence of God. That approach is outmoded, to put it mildly (I'm staying on my best behavior here). The practice of presence is the meat of the matter; it's what this is all about. It's what everything's all about. If you're ready to begin real work, I'm ready to tell you how to do it, no holds barred. If you're ready for the practice of prayer, for the practice of presence, well here they are. This page and Prayer have everything you need to get started. This is the real deal.
All through this website I've pointed you in a certain direction by saying over and over, in different ways and contexts, that being is God in you. Presence means finding that out for yourself. What you want, and what you're always going to be dissatisfied until you get, is the experience of truth, and the truth is that God is in you. Presence isn't about you at all; it's about everything you think of as you stepping aside. When you finally get out of the way, you'll experience God's presence in you. Life will be real.
The possibility of experiencing God's presence is the gift that comes with the curse of becoming. God has cursed you with the unbearable, overwhelming, unavoidable task of becoming like God, but the blessing that comes with the curse is that as you make progress with your impossible task, you'll begin to experience God's presence in you, and that is everything you want, everything you've ever yearned for. The more progress you make, the more you experience God's presence, but that's irrelevant because whatever degree of God's presence you experience is the feeling you've waited your whole life to feel.
Focus is the seed of God's creative power in you and the source of the curse of becoming. The right relationship between focus and presence is that work with focus prepares you to experience the presence of God by building the kind of strength in you that's needed for the practice outlined below; you cultivate the seed with focus so you can bear the fruit of presence.
Walking is how we humans move. Compared to how animals move, our walking seems slow and weak. Animals can walk and run on 4 legs far faster and longer than we can on 2, we can't fly at all, and our swimming is laughable compared to almost any aquatic creature. But walking is how we move, it's how we make progress, and it's the key to the practice of presence.
Breathing has a deep connection to being; that's why the practice of being pleasure begins with the practice of the pleasure of breathing. Walking upright on 2 legs has the same kind of deep connection to being human. We are walking animals, and walking is one of God's great gifts to us and a crucial tool on the path forward. Walking is how we progress.
To engage your life, walk into it. Engage life as a human by walking into it upright, hands free, eyes open, mouth shut. That's the best posture for engaging life. Upright with eyes and other senses open so you can see clearly, maneuver, and contend with what you encounter. Hands free so you can engage - in combat, lovemaking, exploration, getting things done, whatever you want to get out of life. Mouth shut so you can hear what your life has to say.
To compensate for the relative weakness of walking, humans developed riding - horses, cars, watercraft, aircraft, etcetera. Riding is one of our great inventions, and it's helped us get all kinds of things done. But riding won't help you develop; for that you need to walk and engage life. All forms of riding cut you off from the possibility of engaging life. You can only develop on your own power. You need to walk.
Walk, don't run. There's a profound difference between walking and running, an essential difference, not just a difference of degree, intensity or speed. Walking is God's speed, it's the way to move forward that God gave us. Running is fine, it can be full of exuberance and joy, but it's not God's speed. Walking is for all of us. To be unable to walk is more serious than losing a sense; if you're unable to walk, your life is about making progress anyway. Being unable to walk is a very great challenge and a holy state. To be human is to walk.
Approach the practice of presence patiently. Work on the practice of presence happens mostly outdoors. A natural setting makes it a little easier; the beauty of nature - God shining through - softens and relaxes you, making it easier to approach the present moment. Relatively untouched nature is best, but naturalistic gardens and parks also work. The weather doesn't have to be nice; the beauty of nature works just as well in a cold drizzle or a windstorm as it does on a balmy summer afternoon. The more naturalistic the better; formal geometric gardens don't have the softening effect.
The practice consists of walking. Walk, and see everything around you and in you as God, and open to all of it; just melt. Your goal is to see through the boundary you imagine separates the manifestation of God that is you from the manifestation of God that is everything else. That's why the setting is important at first: you find it easier to accept that a field of flowers is God than an industrial landscape. So look for environments relatively free of whatever you have a hard time recognizing as God. But also recognize that that's your limitation and nothing about the landscape itself. Flowers are no more godly than rusting scrap metal.
Only by walking can you bring all of you to this practice; being in one place doesn't have the element of engaging life that's needed to practice presence. You need to move at God's speed to experience the presence of God. If you're physically unable to walk, you'll find a way to do this practice when you're ready for it.
You may think you already know how to open to everything in you and around you and can already do it, but you're wrong. Right now, there are dozens of things in you and around you that you're turning away from. Turning away is absenting yourself, the opposite of presence. Present means present with everything in the time and space you inhabit; not being present with everything is not being present. So to begin, stack the odds in your favor by choosing whatever seems the most "godly" outdoor setting, and take full advantage of the softening effect of natural beauty.
In the practice of prayer, you cultivate toughness and unflinching resolve; in the practice of presence, you cultivate surrender: perfect willingness to embrace all that is without barrier or reserve. Begin your practice of presence by taking walks in the kinds of settings that foster it. Find ways to be in those settings for extended periods, e.g. camping trips, and do lots of walking. In the rest of your life, work on all fronts to develop so you'll be so strong that you'll feel no need for protection. Also work to eliminate falseness inside and out; to become present, you have to be true through and through.
One barrier to presence is all the noise of your life, inside and out. If you go one-on-one with noise, you make more noise, have you noticed? Defeating noise takes a very light touch; it's a delicate, noncombative martial art. Noise and other barriers to presence have to be softened, dissolved, melted away. There's no combat, no force in the practice of presence. Instead, you soften yourself on the way toward surrendering to God in you. The practice of presence is surrender: gently willing yourself to disappear in God.
If you focus your life on becoming, on development, and guide yourself by always seeking whatever results in being pleasure, you'll arrive at presence with or without the specific approach outlined above, because that's what all spiritual development is aimed at: arriving at the spot where you are right now, in the presence of God. That's where you're going, that's what you want: you in the presence of God. That's everything you've ever wanted.
The experience of the presence of God is what everything's all about. When you experience God's presence in you directly, the level at which you are a particular manifestation of God is no longer relevant.
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