I’m never quite sure what people mean when they talk about “being present.” I am even rather vague about what I mean when I say that I am present. However, I am noticing that there are a group of characteristics that show up when I experience what I consider being present. Actually, focusing on those characteristics of experience sometimes help me have an experience of being present.
There are traditionally five aspects of experience, and paying attention to them makes my life much richer. I have more experiential contact with what being present is about. Although they can be looked at individually, they are like the panels of a five-sided ball. While they can be understood when examined individually, they are best experienced when observed all at the same time. Experience is the bundle.
One obvious aspect of experience involves material form. This is the sensory aspect of experiences and includes all matter and the related physical sense impressions. A tea cup sitting next to my keyboard and my seeing it is an aspect of experience. My feeling the warm cup in my hands and pressing my lips against its hard rim all are aspects of my tea cup experience.
Whether this is a pleasant or unpleasant experience is a wholly mental activity and a second aspect of experience. Every experience is pleasant, unpleasant or neither-pleasant-or-unpleasant. Sometimes this is called feeling tone, and it is a basis for developing likes or dislikes, which is another aspect of experience. If I recognize the experience as neither-pleasant-or-unpleasant, it typically means I am tuned out, not paying attention. I am in a moment of delusion. To experience being present, I have to know if the experience is pleasant or unpleasant.
Recognition of the tea cup is another aspect of experience and a second mental activity. In my constant stream of sense activity, I am constantly singling out objects that I recognize. I relate this current experience of seeing and holding a tea cup to a mental storehouse of previous experience. There is great vulnerability and chance of error in this aspect of experience. Recognition or perception is not always accurate. It is important that I suspend beliefs, desires and fears in experiencing a tea cup. It is a challenge to recognize things as they are and not as I imagine them.
A fourth aspect of experience is my attitude to what I perceive. This aspect is also a mental activity and includes all the things that express my will and motivation. This aspect of experience includes a vast range of mental experience: likes, dislikes, confusion, joy, tranquility. My experience of the tea cup can include a great assortment of moods and emotions. My attitude to perception is a major part of the moment of experiencing the tea cup. I often experience my tea cup as comforting, soothing, tasteful, delightful.
The fifth aspect of experience is the knowing quality of my mind or consciousness. It is like a cloak thrown over the rest of the experience. It is the most complex concept of experience, and is the most basic knowing of my tea cup. Consciousness is like the hand passing in front of my face. It is simply there.
There are times that I examine my experience from the perspective of each and all these aspects. Like a pilot going through a check-list before take-off, I check each of the five. Then I hold them all together in my attention, like the pilot who is aware of all the green lights at once.
It is one experience after all, and it is necessary for me to hold all five aspects in mind in order to understand it. I hold them together in one moment, one experience, while still being aware of all five aspects. It is that collective understanding that forms my sense of being present.
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