Presence is simple. Presence is the practice of intentionally being here. That's all there is to it, and it's the key to everything, the holy grail, the treasure hidden in plain sight. It's what meditation is supposed to be but rarely is. Meditation got lost in formal practices eons ago because a formal practice, convoluted and dreary as it may be, is much easier than intentionally being here. You can demonstrably do a formal practice correctly, but presence is ineffable. No one can tell but you. What keeps me from being present is mental noise: my internal monolog. As long as that's going on, I am not present. And I was not present for the first fifty-five years of my life, except for brief moments of spontaneous presence. Being present intentionally is the adult version of spontaneous presence. It's the crucial foundation for the second kind of development.
Going deeper. The ultimate practice of being intentionally present is intentionally surrendering myself to my own internal authority, aka Leela: conscious surrender. The practice I describe at that link is just that: a practice, a dry run to prepare me for something greater. No one can be fully present by their own effort. Consciously surrendering myself to Leela, asking her to do whatever she wants with me is my one percent: a critical step, the only thing I can do in the direction of real presence. A moment of presence is a moment when Leela lives through me, when I embody her; that's the 99 percent. When she lives through me like that it's an experience I can only describe as strange and disconcerting: how odd it is, that I am this one particular human being; how can that be? How can I be so small, so very particular? That experience comes as a gift, like inner silence. A gift worth working an uncountable number of lifetimes to be ready to receive. The feeling of Leela living through me for an instant is so powerful it's disorienting. It's the ultimate feel-good chemical. So I get to experience it only quite rarely, to keep me from burning out. I do treasure those moments when they come.
Formal meditation is bullshit. It never worked for me. I got dull and listless whenever I tried formal sitting. I nodded off. My thoughts wandered unstoppably. I was anything but present. Meditation is supposed to be something I do to make progress with love, but it takes love to make love. Leela says meditation is useless unless I love it. She insists any work I do to get closer to her be lively and playful like she is, that it feel like being in love. Anything I do can be meditation as long as I love doing it. The formal meditation I did for all those years had its uses, even though I made no progress doing it. I needed to build discipline and devote some part of my life to the spiritual quest. I'm happy to be done with that stage. These days my meditation is doing the things I love to do as well as I can do them. Like partner dancing, cooking, and writing these stories. I make progress by giving my full attention to the things and people I love and then working to be better at whatever I'm doing, e.g. dancing or cooking. Not fancier, better. More attentive; more creative. I threw myself into things spontaneously as a child in moments of spontaneous presence. But I lost that gift by taking up recreational drugs in Kenya. Drugs kiboshed my spontaneous spark. They eclipsed the deep part my life until I fought my way out of using.
Presence and creativity. Human creativity comes in two versions, noble and ignoble. Noble creativity is the work of Leela being done through a human. It is life-affirming, contributing to my well-being and that of other humans while causing no current or future harm to nature. Noble creativity can pass through me only when I'm present in the moment, only when I'm truly here, doing whatever it is I'm doing and being wherever I am, undistracted by the noise in my head. Ignoble creativity is using the godlike power to create something that causes harm, directly or indirectly, to people or nature. That happens when people use their creative powers to accomplish any goal based on thinking. Thinking leads people to act selfishly, creating out of greed, fear, anger, and other unworthy emotions. Ignoble creativity includes work toward goals people think are noble, e.g. well-meaning social programs that end up not helping or even worsening the situation of the people they're supposed to be helping. No one can save the world. I'm the only one I can save.
The left hand path. In Kenya, cannabis kicked my thinking into overdrive, filling my head with words, images, recitations, mental noise. The noise in my head kept me from being present, kept me from hearing the ring of truth. Leela showed me that inner silence can't be earned or achieved. I can't find my way to inner silence by any amount of sitting and looking at a candle or a bare wall or similar claptrap. I have to surrender to Leela and let her take me there. My escape from booze then pot shows what worked for me. The left hand path (Vamachara) has been the only path worth taking all along.
Left-handed guidance worked for me because Leela was in charge, not some so-called teacher or worse yet my own brain. I can't play the fool on purpose, knowing that's what I'm doing. It only works if I'm a real fool, in real pain. Of my own free will. Leela knows left-hand motivators like fear, misery and pain are what really get me moving.
Cooking. Being present changes my relationship with time. If I can slow down enough inside to turn whatever I'm doing into meditation, I can manifest a touch of 5-space in my doing. I can do a thing wisely by working hard on being present. My laboratory for working on this has been cooking. The first step is to take all the time constraints out of cooking a meal by seeing the whole process, start to finish, as if it were outside time. If I become silent I can see through time a little the way we ordinarily see through space. The meal becomes an artwork I'm entering and I see how all the pieces of the process connect and relate to each other. If I stay with that vision of cooking the meal as a unitary work of art, I'm never caught off balance by what comes next. I worked on this by slowing everything down to a snail's pace, stopping to breathe and shut my eyes for a moment in between each step. It has utterly transformed how I cook a meal.
Multitasking is the fine art of fucking up several things at once. Meditation is becoming present. Presence requires inner silence. Presence and inner silence are the same thing. If I'm present, my full attention is focused on here and now: where I am now, what I'm doing now. I have no attention left over for anything else. The opposite of being present is being absent, being in my head, being distracted. Being absent is touted as a virtue in the guise of multitasking. But if I'm present I can only do one thing at a time, and that one thing requires my full attention if I'm to do it well.
Twelve steps. Inner silence is a gift Leela gave me. She used extreme concentrations of cannabis to shock me into a state of inner silence. That glorious moment of awakening was immediately followed by a months-long panic attack brought on by the extreme discord between being in a new state while polluted with cannabis residue. The panic attack was also guidance from Leela. Panic forced me to seek help from 12-step programs. At AA and MA I learned about the spiritual part of recovery and was able to complete my transition from being a dry drunk to being cured of addiction forever.