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The Anatomy of Presence
Thoreau’s Perpetual Ecstasy
“Be more present”, goes today’s banal, omnipresent suggestion on how we ought to live better. MIT philosopher Kieran Setiya uses a jargonized version, praising the atelic counterparts of our telic activities. Platitudes tell us life’s nectar resides in the moment, the proverbial Now. Figures like Thich Nhat Hanh claim Western culture is built upon, if not for, the purpose of distracting us from the present, to our spiritual, existential detriment.
I don’t doubt this, any of it, really. But I wonder if the surging use of the term, ‘presence’, is producing an anesthetic effect where we feel so familiar with the idea that we cease inquiring into what it really means. What does ‘being present’ look like? Is it an outwardly observable state, or an invisible, internal experience? When Richard Alpert and fellow Americans began voyaging over to India, largely in search of an altered experience of the present moment they’d found on LSD, their supposedly enlightened teacher, Neem Karoli Baba, along with other Indian sages like Ramana Maharshi, were often described as, ‘motionless corpse[s] from which God is radiating terrifically’. If enlightenment is thought of as a complete and stable presence, does it always ‘radiate’ a sensation perceptible to others?
