“Presence allows you to once more receive those signals, to genuinely see, hear, and feel them pulling you towards your future Self.”
Enhancing Your Experience of Being
Moving on from denoising the mind, the first principle of the Same Method, we can dive into the practice of becoming present.
Being present, as we understand it, is a combination of two things: being free from mental noise, and being able to take in what you sense and experience.
If someone is truly present, that presence allows them to make clear choices that ring true to one’s authentic Self.1 Simultaneously, presence enriches your experience of Being because you enjoy the here and now in a more conscious way.
Hence, within the Same Method, training the ability to be truly present serves three main motives:
1. To experience more thoroughly.
2. To stay honest to yourself and your situation.
3. To better perceive the glimpses of your future Self.
When we cease to merely look and start to see, something curious unfolds: both the inner- and outer world start integrating themselves more deeply inside our consciousness.
But don’t mistake this enriching of the present moment to be solely an enjoyable thing, as enforcing joy in an experience in which there is none is a fruitless pursuit. The real fruits of being fully present don’t revolve around merely positive sensation, but rather around living in capital T-Truth.
Presence, Through The Good And The Bad
No matter what situation we find ourselves to be in, they can all be either experienced richly, or poorly. The point of being present is to experience them truthfully, and as fully as possible, for that is where growth and true inner richness spring from.
As an example: when we are confronted with pain, loss, disappointment or embitterment, a common reaction is to avoid those sensations. We hide and duck away, into the rabbit hole of distractions, perhaps hoping that those bad things will one day go away on their own account.
The point is, those bad things won’t ever go away until we truly face them.2 Instead, they stay exactly where they are, and in the meantime, we become accustomed to our new situation of inner avoidance, however miserable or disconnected from the truth that situation might be.
Likewise, in situations where life is genuinely good, we should be capable enough to honour those experiences in their true, full forms. This way, we never take it for granted and continue working to bring heaven closer to earth, if not for yourself, then for the people close to you.
This is the dynamic of being present: to face reality in truth, to fully live any experience that life throws at us, and grow by the fullness of the human experience. The present moment is also where existential courage takes root: the courage needed to get into meaningful action.
By the way, if this resonates with you, we can send new thoughts and reflections straight to your inbox. Yes, send them →
Glimpses Of The Future Self
The third motive is that true presence allows us to perceive the direction towards other possible selves3 more clearly: versions of who we could also be, for better or worse.
This is not a belief in faith or a higher order per se, but rather a perspective that allows you to trust your own feelings, intuition, and make decisions with intent that move you toward a better future self.
To distinguish which version of that future self is genuinely yours, we draw on C.G. Jung’s concept of the Self 4 (note: that’s with a capital S-Self): the integrated totality of the psyche, both conscious and unconscious, which a person can grow into over the course of a lifetime.
Since all possible selves live in the future and are brought to life (or left unlived) through our actions in the present moment, we’ll also refer to the Self as “the future Self”.
Now that we’ve established the future Self, here is why presence matters in relation to that future Self:
As described by Jung, the Self has a gravitational pull, trying to align us with the Self that is wholesome. In that sense, the future Self is always communicating with our present selves, sending us signals and breadcrumbs that we can follow.
It does so rather silently, through interests, genuine curiosity, intuition, or the “click” you feel when you encounter certain people, ideas, or things.
However, those signals are easy to miss.
The noise in our minds drowns them out, distraction pulls our attention away from them, and baked-in narratives about who you are or what you ought to be (the persona), override the signals that invite you into new, uncharted territory that manifests the future Self.
The remedy, is presence.
Receptiveness Through Presence
Presence allows you to once more receive those signals, to genuinely see, hear, and feel them pulling you towards your future Self.
When the mind is de-noised and attention rests in the here and now, you can start recognising which interests are truly yours, and which of them were never yours to begin with, planted by social conditioning, culture, or modernity’s algorithms of distraction.
This, in turn, gives practical weight to the meaning of “living up to your true character”: to first be able to perceive those glimpses of the future Self, to trust them, and, finally, to act upon them, as laid out in the fourth and final pillar of the Same Method.
To be able to perceive those genuine signals is what we coin Receptiveness through Presence: the ability to truly perceive what the future Self is guiding you towards.
Presence In Daily Life
At Qué Será, we create containers dedicated to training presence through various exercises. Those exercises are derived from our backgrounds as performance artists, in which presence is one of the core elements of what makes a strong performer.
However, you can cultivate presence in your daily life and utilize the benefits, right where you currently are. One way of doing so, is to resist distractions that take you away from the present moment.
As an example: when you’re waiting to catch a train, you’re confronted with a moment of nothingness. When confronted with such nothingness, the default reaction is to distract ourselves5, nowadays primarily through phones or other means of entertainment.
But in doing so, we flee from the here and now, missing out on the theatre of the world that is right in front of us.
Therefore, you can choose to engage with those seeming moments of nothingness instead: What do you really see in front of you? What scents do you smell, what sounds do you hear?
What are other people doing? Where are they going? What is their relation, or what are they leaving behind? When we start to pay attention to what is right in front of us, we’ll also start to feel how the inner world relates to the outer one.
Perhaps at first, being present in this manner takes effort: in times of continuous distraction available all around us, we need to relearn to guide our attention to stay present in the here and now.
But eventually, that presence starts to become your “new normal” once more. You’ll be more apt to conceive the here and now in its fullness, increasing your awareness and self-concept clarity. On top of that, once in a while, you’ll catch glimpses of your future Self and all that wants to awaken inside of you.
Continue to #3: Creating Vigor
Knowing the benefits of being present in the here and now, we can continue to the third component of the Same Method: Creating Vigor.
Footnotes
- The benefits of being present: mindfulness and its role in psychological well-being ↩︎
- Akbari et al. (2022): Experiential avoidance and psychological distress — a meta-analysis of 441 studies ↩︎
- Markus & Nurius’s foundational paper on Possible Selves (American Psychologist, 1986) ↩︎
- Collected Works of C. G. Jung (1959): Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self ↩︎
- Just think: The challenges of the disengaged mind ↩︎
