Peter says, “Actually, I only live in the past.†Do others agree?
Kum Nye exercises connected with Time are powerful, at least in my experience, to make us taste more fully the present (or presence) of each moment, especially the one called ‘Being and Body’. Sometimes when practicing I feel I can step into the Present, over and over, giving each moment back to Time. I mean, there is no need to build stories between moments. This feels a different kind of knowledge from the descriptive knowledge which depends on connecting moment to moment to constitute the self’s ‘known world’. Yes, when I live in this world of the self, I only live in the past. However I feel in my experience a possibility of freedom which has a quality of aliveness and freshness, of curiosity and presence different from the “reality we cannot change” (p.111) of the known world. I wonder… is this experience related at all with what was required by the exercice, moving from point to point in awareness, investigating ‘X’, etc…
Marcia
Marcia offers a good test: what does an experience ‘do’ in our lives. But Peter, you must be pointing to something that makes you hesitate about the ‘ongoing’ reality of your experience. Can you say more about this?
If this presence means more aliveness and clarity in our lives, is it not as pointer of “real” presence?
Yes, I agree: when I did the exercise “bending in the four directions” (I learned it in a retreat) it seemed to me, there was only presence. But is it possible for me, to “catch” the feeling in the presence or did this presence change to the past and I didn´t feel the “real” presence?
In the Kum Nye exercise I put past and future aside. My feeling with the perception was presence.
But: did I avoid the “real” presence?