Timeless Presence and Engaged Response

The path of Awakening in Life includes realizing timeless presence and cultivating engaged response to this life and world as it is and we are.

The path of Awakening in Life emphatically opposes the idea that practices and experiences of timeless presence and engaged response with life are at odds with one another. In fact Awakening in Life embraces them both as inseparable, mutually supportive, and cultivating both leads to more efficacy, depth, and breadth of experience in both.

A few core assertions on the relationship and interconnectedness of timeless presence and engaged response as practices and ways of living:

Timeless presence supports response by accessing more experiential room for all of the content and forms of life and our experience (and its evolving and changing nature). We have more room for our living experience to be known, and this room supports a process of embodying, integrating, and the possibility of new responses and ways of being to emerge.

Awakening to timeless presence we can better see and work with our conditioning in this life, from the basic operating processes of our self to social and cultural conditioning, increasing the potential to cultivate a safer, more joyful, meaningful, connected, and dignified life for everyone.

Engaged response reminds us to let go into timeless presence. When we are responsively engaged in life, life inevitably reminds us that we must find ways to let go, lest we be trapped by our conditioning, swept away with idealism, unable to truly and effectively respond in the ways that are needed. In letting go to what is, we also have the opportunity to be present in gratitude for what is good, even in the midst of pain.

Response reminds us not to bypass and abandon ourselves and this world - we're in this together. For what other reason should we awaken than for this life we are all living right now in this very moment, this life that has history and is unfolding into the future? Life asks us to respond and not remain in a transcendent experience, disassociating from our individuality, and especially our shared social and cultural world, and the planet we inhabit, and instead to bring the fullness of our awakened presence into this life.

Timeless presence reveals that we are inextricably connected to one another, the world, and the kosmos. That we all die, and miraculously we have been born. That this life we all have and share, this world and planet we inhabit, is precious.

Now that we’ve established the integration and need of a path of awakening that includes both timeless presence and engaged response, let’s look at each of them separately, on their ‘own’ terms, while still remembering each by themselves are incomplete.