What I Mean When I Say “Be Present”

I have a confession. It is a small one that turns out to be large.

I have been saying “Be present.” “Be in the present moment.” “Be here now.” I have said it to clients, to friends, to myself. It rolls off the tongue — and of course it does, because everyone says it. The airport-bookstore mystics say it. The meditation apps say it. It has become the common currency of anyone who wants to sound awake.

And I am only now noticing how unconscious I have been every single time the words left my mouth. I leaned on the phrase like a worn coin, passing it along without ever once asking what it was worth. Ambiguous. Vague. Not particularly helpful to anyone — least of all to me.

How wonderful to discover.

Because my journey — which is, of course, our journey — is one of self-inquiry. So let me actually go into this thing we keep calling “presence.” And let me stand on the shoulders of two giants while I do it: Eckhart Tolle and David Hawkins.

Start with Tolle’s line above. Awareness and ego cannot coexist. Sit with what that quietly demands. If awareness only arises where the ego is not, then awareness cannot be grasped by the ego — and it certainly cannot be described by it. The ego is nothing more than my fear-based, conditioned mind. How could the frightened, grasping part of me ever put words around the one thing that exists only in its absence?

So I will say it plainly: presence is ineffable. It is a state of Being that can only be experienced, never described.

I am not here to do what Tolle does and declare that awareness kills the ego. I am only trying to conceptualize what awareness is. And the strange thing is that the only way in seems to be through what it is not — the way of negation. Which tells me exactly where we are standing. We are in the territory of higher consciousness. We are in the territory of Spirit.

Here is what I can say. If awareness exists only in the absence of ego, then presence is far less like coming to and far more like letting go. The action is to release. The reaction is to receive. You do not march toward presence. You lay down what you have been carrying, and presence arrives.

And what have you been carrying? The ego. Its whole role — its only role — is survival, and it performs that role by keeping you feeling separate. It identifies you with your body, your thoughts, your beliefs, and then it binds you to them with fear. This is me. That is not me. Defend the border. That border is the ego’s entire kingdom.

Let the border fall and something astonishing remains: you are One with everything. This is unity of consciousness. Awareness is Oneness. To be present is to be in complete harmony with all that surrounds you — devoid of identification, devoid of attachment.

This is where Hawkins becomes useful. On his Map of Consciousness, the first fully non-dual state is Peace, calibrating just below Enlightenment itself. And so I will finally say the thing I never understood when I was tossing the phrase around:

To be present is to be at Peace.

And to be at Peace is to be free. Free from attachment. Free from shame, from guilt, from fear, from desire, from pride. Free from every last belief that you are separate from the creation that surrounds you.

So hear me, because this is precisely what I got wrong for years. Being present is not “locking in.” It is not “getting focused.” It is not putting the phone down. Those are useful tools — keep them, use them. But they are not this. Being Present is a state of consciousness that arises when I let go of everything I identify with that keeps me separate from you. It is the flow state in which there is no longer any distance between the observer and the observed.

It is the kingdom of heaven. It is the promised land. It is nirvana. It is the place every spiritual system on earth points toward and not one of them can speak.

And now that I have actually looked at this thing called presence, I hold it far more profoundly — and I will be far more impeccable with my words going forward. I do want to be present. I understand now that it is far more my journey than my destination. But the journey itself has turned out more beautiful than I could ever have imagined.

I hope you will join me on this road to happy destiny.

The Way