Presence is the Aroma of Being

Being is the Loving Awareness that is your Essential Nature

“Be-Here-Now” mindfulness collects your heart and mind into Oneness

This Oneness, whole and collected, resonates Presence
Presence gravitates your mind to its source in Loving Awareness.
You are that Loving Awareness

The silent witness to everything you think about yourself.

The power of collected Being gives the mind a place to abide
Otherwise it spins in the clouds of the mental dialog,
the cloud of self-referential thinking and insecurity

Through the very process of being conditioned as a child in grasping the world at the direction of our parents and society, we automatically create an illusory self-image identity, comparing ourselves what is expected and hoped from us.

This Self Image assumes a life its own by dominating the scope of our awareness, it borrows life energy and consciousness from that attention, and so becomes almost real; real enough to resist letting go of its assumed role.

Incessant chattering of the mind and ultimate insecurity go hand in hand with believing yourself to be the discursive voice in your head.  The voice remains “you” by never ceasing but can never be truly at peace or validated because it’s not real, it’s just a persistent conditioned mental vortex sustained by years of seeming to be all there is within you.

The irony is we might the central fact of our existence because it illuminates everything in our experience but itself.  We search for Self-realization mistakenly, like searching for the retina of our own eye. 

This is where Presence, Collected Be-Here-Now awareness blesses us.  You can never leave the confining and tormented but familiar state of identity so long as your mind doesn’t have a place of peace and love to abide in instead.  Collected mindful Being is that place, let’s call it the Heart, where the mind can abide in peace, arising as needed in its true and rightful roles in negotiating life unfolding. 

We gradually move our habitual center of being from the false ego and monkey mind to the Heart by returning to that center resonating from collected be-here-now awareness,
over and over and over again, until we feel viscerally that this is home, this is peace and this is the Source of  Love which can never been taken from us.

We are that Love itself.

Meditation greatly accelerates this movement to the heart by breaking the incessant habit of associative thinking, but, once again, mindfulness makes meditation possible by collecting presence for the mind to abide in.  Without developing presence, the mind is automatically restless.

Definitively breaking the spell of the illusory self-image and thus abiding in the light and love of true Being shining through the window of the individual soul wearing a meat suit on this dense planet is called self-realization.

Mindfulness and meditation create the foundation for self-realization to occur but there’s one more ingredient beyond our control. 

Grace

Grace is the touch of the divine, an awakening

Having a word for it doesn’t mean it can be understood

It happens because it happens, in divine timing, although awakened beings, entheogens and radical life events often act as catalysts.

Younger generations have many individuals basically born in grace who will more easily come to realize themselves.  This is a hopeful sign for humanity as these souls didn’t come just to watch the world burn.

Ultimately Grace cannot be forced and even the “Be-Here-Now” mindfulness needs to live in expression according the life path of each person.

Each person is dancing their own poetry of life, according their gifts and predilections.  The Universal Source of all, Spirit, fully embraces each soul in lifetimes of evolution.  There is no judgment. Only Love.  

No-one is required to be better or do anything to be fully perfect in the divine eyes.  It’s just that the world is a Hall of Mirrors that continually reflects the energy that we’ve put into it. This is called Karma and it’s not about blame, reward or punishment, but of learning through experience. The process isn’t obvious to some because life wouldn’t be the play that it is if the workings of the Spirit and Life were naked before us.

We choose to evolve because evolution leads away from pain and into Peace and Love.

There are many paths to evolution.

For some people, raising a family with loving care and serving in society with integrity according to their circumstances may be their highest achievement in evolution, with so many lessons and expansions naturally happening on that epic journey if done with sincerity.  We should be careful about judging what others “Should” do.
Caring for the sick and impoverished, supporting each other in life and death, helping uplift the fallen and just how we treat everyone around us are all ways that how we live may be greater than what we do for a living.

Whatever we do with presence and attention serves us.  Whatever leads us away from awareness harms us.  What we do to awaken helps awaken us, and what we do to numb our emotional pain only numbs what still remains within.

Those with a conscious spiritual intention may be inclined along paths generalized in ancient writings: the devotional Path of the Heart, the Discerning Wisdom of the Intellect, the various paths of yogic, shamanic or spiritual practices of whatever traditions, and taking the help of awakened ones, plant medicines or entheogens and the collective support of conscious community and friends.  There is nothing exhaustive in this list.  Humanity itself is evolving and practices once near the center of religion and spirituality have naturally been discarded or faded over time.

A new paradigm is emerging.  Until recently, enlightenment-oriented spirituality taught that ignoring and transcending emotions was integral to spiritual goals.  This was an old paradigm that feared and disempowered the feminine polarity of Spirit, known as Ananda (bliss) as Shakti (the power that creates everything) and is Love itself.  The traditions held up the elevated concepts of the ultimate feminine without a path to transmute the emotional energy locked within us.

In the new paradigm, we heal and integrate our emotional selves just as we needed to reform our mental selves.  We transmute our darkness with awareness so that Love shines from within us. Its intuitive power informs our conscious awareness which illumines our world.  Along with embracing the Feminine polarity within comes respecting Nature, the environment we share with all Life

Embracing both polarities of Spirit, Knowing Consciousness and Blissful Love, is Truth in Completeness.

“I am Loving awareness”

approached by constantly returning to

“Be-Here-Now”

In the Spirit of Ram Dass “We are all walking each other Home” I hope we’ve shared a moment of intention on the walk together with this written journey. 

Wishing Peace, Love and Light to All.

Karl Baba.

PS. When a universe has a download for humanity, a person willing and able to be the channel for that download gets inspired and empowered to walk that role. This is an aspect of the “Guru Principle” the one guiding energy of Spirit everywhere.  I give thanks to Ram Dass for translating that download for a generation in the spirit of those times, not needing or claiming to be perfect in the walk of it all.  “Be Here Now” was the title of his book which served as a seminal guidebook for a generation.  “I am Loving Awareness” is reputed to be something of his mantra to himself in later life.

Studying Indian Traditions myself, I was surprised Ram Dass was able to distill that essential aphorism “Be Here Now” which is not clearing stated or emphasized as such in Indian Traditions.  I hear the phrase originated with Bhagavan Dass although, once again, I think it’s a download for these times from Spirit itself.