From Presence to Presence

From Presence to Presence

From our Friend, Irene C.

The teaching passes from Third Eye to Third Eye—from Presence to Presence. — The Teacher

Recently I was asked to lead one of our worldwide Zoom meetings, which involves over one hundred participants from all over the world; there are also multiple simultaneous translations into other languages such as Spanish, Russian, and Hindi. As the leader I could not see most participants and only knew a few. What we have in common is participation in the same Fourth Way School.

So, how in these circumstances does one reach their Third Eyes? It begins with me as leader—I must be in Third Eye, remembering my Self from the outset. Unlike most teaching, which is one intellectual center trying to fill another, here we must bypass those parts to reveal a higher state of consciousness and connect with each other. What we are practicing, Presence, requires using the present to experience the state.

I was allowed to use any topic, which was “interacting with reality to prolong Presence,” but there should be a minute of silence. This meeting used that moment to make certain points: after a short introduction, everyone was asked to participate in a minute of silence with their mute buttons on, each of us was to listen only to our personal background noises, i.e., the things usually ignored in a Zoom meeting. At the same time, we were to be aware of ourselves listening to those sounds. For me, I heard a refrigerator humming, the sound of my breath, and nearby construction noise. We were to note what we heard, but not think about it. (This type of divided attention replicates what happens in a state of Presence, i.e.,one’s attention is divided.)

In North America it was winter; but in South America and India it was warm; in some places it was early morning, in some places it was night. Some were joining from their sickrooms, others sitting in a restaurant, or in a crowded room, or in a parked car. Everyone’s reality at that scale is slightly different—birdsongs, plates rattling, people talking, music playing, and so on. Returning to the meeting, a few shared our different experiences. Then everyone was asked to continue the rest of the meeting with their attention divided between the shared “higher reality” of the meeting and their own set of background sounds. It was pointed out that this experience of being aware of noises while participating in a higher reality is very similar to experiencing the third or fourth state of consciousness: our own many ‘I’s do not disappear, they are still there, but they are perceived as background noises.

How about you? What background noises are you hearing right now? Can you attend to them and still be aware of your Self listening? This is Self-remembering.

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Eye of Horus, Egyptian Bracelet (Detail) 943-922 BC