Joseph Naft Notes

COGNITIVE PRESENCE


Cognitive Presence
(Aspect 9 of 12 of the Path to Presence)
Cognitive presence means presence in our mind, in that part of us that cognizes or mentally registers perceptions and especially thoughts. We practice cognitive presence by putting our attention into our head and being there in our mind. Doing so attracts the sensitive energy of thought, the sensitive energy of cognition, into our mind. Just as the sensitive energy in our body enables us to be in contact with our body and its sensations, and the sensitive energy of emotion enables us to be in contact with our center of emotion and our emotions, so the sensitive energy of cognition enables us to be in contact with our mind and its contents.
But presence of mind means more than contact, because contact implies a division: something or someone who is in contact with something else, an observer and an observed. Body presence means inhabiting our body, being in our body, at one with it. Emotional presence means inhabiting our center of emotion, being in our chest and solar plexus region. And cognitive presence means inhabiting our mind, being in our mind, owning our mind. We are not standing back as an observer of our thoughts. We are right there in our mind — no division and no separation. But we are there intentionally and in sensitive awareness of our mind. Here I am in my head, in the place from which I cognize, know, think, and see.
This is a far cry from our typical mental state of being lost in thought, which operates on the automatic energy. In cognitive presence, such automatic associative thoughts may continue, but now you are present in them. The thought stream, whether associative or intentional, occurs within the mind you are occupying. Cognitive presence means being the one who is aware of and standing in the thought stream and, more generally, the one who is cognizing, knowing, and seeing.
The sensitive energy of cognition tends to raise the level our thoughts. Rather than arising by their typical automatic associations, our thoughts become more relevant to what we are doing, to our situation of the moment. We have less mental clamor and chaos. With cognitive presence we are more able to focus on a topic, more able to think clearly and logically, more able to see into the heart of matters. When automatic thoughts do arise, we are aware of them as thoughts and less likely to be swept away by them.
Cognitive presence is not about intentional thinking, but rather about intentional awareness in the context and contents of our mind. While this may include intentional thinking on a particular subject, it is not limited to that because you can be cognitively present in the absence of thoughts. You can be there, in your mind, knowing and cognizing without necessarily thinking.
The practice of cognitive presence works best when coupled with body or emotional presence. On its own, cognitive presence all-too-readily gets carried away in the stream of associative thoughts, opinions, daydreams, commentary, self-talk, attractions and repulsions. The sensitive energy of cognition thins out and scatters, leaving us adrift in our usual automatic mind. But when, along with cognitive presence, we simultaneously practice presence in our body or our center of emotion, we have a better chance at sustaining cognitive presence. Our body or emotional presence helps keep us from falling prey to the thought stream. Thoughts may come and go, but we stand anchored in body or heart and see our thoughts arising and passing. Here in mind and here in body, or here in mind and here in emotion, we are.
For this week, practice bringing your attention into your mind. Enter your mind. Inhabit it. Emerge from floating down your thought stream to anchor yourself in the present. Let the stream pass through you without passing with it. Become the context of your mind and aware of its contents. Be the one who cognizes, knows, thinks, and sees through your mind. Be the knowing, the cognizing, the seeing. Be your mind.



EMOTIONS

Emotions drive us, for better or for worse. Emotions can drive us to distraction or to contact, to violence or to friendship, to self-centeredness or to service. The remarkable range of emotions, from the petty to the sublime, imparts richness to our life. All emotions share the common feature that they can and often do affect our behavior, inner and outer, as well as the quality of our experience. Emotions define our motivations and impose them on us. As such, every spiritual path addresses how to work with emotions.
In the way of presence, we begin with practicing awareness of emotions as emotions. Lack of such awareness relegates us more firmly into the grip of destructive emotions. We react emotionally to some event and we are just lost in the emotion, carried away by it. Our emotion controls us, at least inwardly, even if we do not react outwardly. Maybe someone angers us in a conversation and perhaps we choose to suppress it and not say anything. Nevertheless, the anger may seethe within. We feel angry. We may even know that we are angry. Yet the key fact is that the anger is the center of our world at that moment. We have no inner context within which to see the anger as anger, as an emotional state that arose and will pass. We collapse into the anger and have no presence, as the soul blood of our inner energies burns up. And so it goes with much of our emotional life.
One help in recognizing our emotions as emotions consists of noticing how they affect our physical body. We may experience a change in our heart rate or breathing, tightness in our chest, certain facial expressions, tones of voice, gestures, or postures. Each kind of emotion may have its own characteristic signature of physical effects. Stressful emotions also have more subtle effects on our physical health, effects not immediately noticeable. For now though, our practice is simply to see what we can see, to see our emotions in action, for example in our body.
Another help in recognizing emotions as emotions consists of noticing how they affect our thoughts. Repetitious and insistent patterns of thought can key us to their emotional driver. Thoughts can exhibit a tone that reflects the underlying emotion, just as our tone of voice often does. The tone of our inner thought-voice can manifest stressful or destructive emotions. So being aware of the qualities of our thoughts helps us recognize their emotional underpinnings.
Thankfully, the broad palette of our emotions is not all destructive. Far from it! Many emotions lift us up, both in the ordinary course of life and in our deepening spiritual practice. Awareness of emotions as emotions enables us to know which to nurture and which to let go. We allow and nurture the emotions that bring us closer to each other, to ourselves, to life, and to God. Much of our spiritual practice, such as meditation and prayer, nurtures those higher emotions.
We also allow the destructive emotions that create barriers, but we do not nurture them nor do we necessarily act from them. We allow, so as not to fight our emotions directly, which only energizes them. Any effort to suppress emotions backfires. Emotions are not illusory; they have a relative reality arising from causes within us. Suppressing emotions can, at best, only treat the symptoms, leaving their underlying causes untouched and ready to surface again and again. While we do not fight our destructive emotions, we also do not nurture them. We see and accept ourselves as we are, and our emotions they are, without layering on another level of emotional judgment and self-rejection. We see and accept and allow them to wane and disappear on their own. By opening our accepting and compassionate heart toward ourselves, including our destructive emotions, we heal their underlying causes.
Whether those causes lie in our personal history or elsewhere, they now take the shape of our identifications, our attachments, and our desires to have things be different than they are. We will address that in a later aspect of the path to presence.
For this week, please set yourself to notice your emotions as emotions, to realize in the midst of an emotion that it is an emotion that has you. If you watch television or movies you can see how the shows and commercials manipulate your emotions. If you drive, you can see how problems such as traffic and rude drivers activate your emotions. If you live with your family, you can see how the give-and-take of family life activates your emotions. In your favorite activities, in hearing a good joke, and in deep meditation, you can see and feel your joy.
Notice that this is not suggesting that we distance ourselves from our emotions. We feel and be in them, fully. We want to live fully, not impoverish our life by eliminating or stigmatizing our emotions. But we do want to heal the destructive and nurture the uplifting, without rejecting or even criticizing ourselves along the way. We open our heart and learn to love ourselves, emotions and all.

THOUGHTS

Thoughts carry power: the power to create and the power to destroy, the power to understand and control much of our world, the power to guide us toward inner freedom and the power to keep us inwardly enslaved. For these and other reasons, our civilization worships the power of thought. Consequently our education revolves around enriching the content and developing the process of thought.
But in all of that, we miss the fact that the power and quality of thought depends on the quality or level of energy fueling the thoughts. The energy most commonly giving substance to our thoughts is the automatic energy. Our endless stream of self-generating, associative thoughts runs on automatic, without any intentional direction. One thought triggers another related thought, which triggers a third related to the second. Soon our thoughts have no apparent relationship with the first thought. And then some sensory perception pops into our awareness, the sound of a word, a sight, a pain, and our thoughts abruptly fly off in another direction altogether. This semi-chaotic mind goes on all day, every day.
In itself, our automatic stream of associative thoughts does no harm and even brings value. For example, that ongoing commentary on our life provides some comfort, something familiar, a touchstone amid the constant changes of our external world. But this is where our relationship with our associative thoughts passes into trouble, where power of thought exceeds its proper place.
The first problem is the extent to which we live in our thoughts. We listen to and occasionally participate in this ongoing mental commentary. And rather than just being about our life, our thoughts become our life. We allow our attention to be swept away in the stream of associative thoughts, veiling us from the simple and ordinary perceptions of living. For example, we often do not fully see the people around us because we are too busily engaged in our thoughts. We get lost in conversations because our thoughts distract us from listening. We sometimes walk with little awareness of our surroundings or our body, because we are in our thoughts. The thought stream substitutes for a more complete life.
The second problem is the extent to which we live as our thoughts. Their very familiarity lulls us into assuming that, in some fundamental sense, we are our thoughts, that what our thoughts think is what we believe, and that we are, or rather I am, the thinker of these thoughts. But even a little observation of our mind shows that these ever-present associative thoughts are thinking themselves, constructing themselves out of the material of our memory of experiences, information, and habitual patterns, coupled with those current sensory stimuli that are strong enough to break through our perceptual filters.
Out of this emerges our personality, a complex but fairly static pattern of thoughts, attitudes, memories, and responses. And that’s who we believe we are. When a thought comes into our mind, though unbidden and by association, we nevertheless believe that is what we think and even that we are that thought. But we did not think that thought. It thought itself. Thoughts masquerade as us. The thought stream substitutes for us, allowing us to live primarily on autopilot with minimal participation in our life. The thought “I,” is not the I who we truly are. Live, in the moment, the challenge is to see our thoughts as just thoughts, and nothing more.
But if we are not our thoughts, not our emotions, not our personality, then who are we? The truest answer is that we are our will. And we shall explore that understanding in a later aspect of the path to presence.
For this week, notice your automatic, associative thoughts passing through your mind. The You who sees your thoughts is not just another thought, is not a function of your thoughts. Notice that your thoughts are not you, though they seduce you into believing that you are these self-generating thoughts chaining on in their own way. This is the ephemeral, insubstantial core on which our personality is based, the personality that we think we are, that substitutes for us. See your thoughts as just thoughTS.

HARMONIOUS

A stool, to be stable, requires at least three legs. So it is with presence. The act of simultaneously engaging all three presences of body, heart, and mind greatly multiplies our chances of maintaining our presence. The three interact and mutually support each other. When one of these presences weakens, the other two can reinvigorate it. With all three, we feel more solid; we stand firmly in the world of presence, of being here fully. So the first benefit of triune presence is the enhanced duration it enables.
Another major benefit lies in the breadth of triune presence. We become more fully human, anchored in our body with an alert, open, and adaptable mind and an appropriately sensitive heart. Our experience becomes more rounded, more balanced, and enriched. Clarity of mind is warmed by sensitivity of feeling, and both are grounded in the present moment of our body.
A third significant benefit is the intensity of triune presence, the vividness it brings to our experience. The three presences of body, heart, and mind combine to form a stronger presence than one or two could. One reason lies in the degree and quality of attention needed to enter and maintain such presence. In meeting the challenge of being in all three, we raise the level of our inner work for those moments. But there is also a feedback from our awakened body, heart, and mind that supports the intensity of triune presence.
So how do we actually practice triune presence? In recent weeks we have worked at body presence, emotional presence, and cognitive presence. Now we can work on putting it all together.
We begin the practice of triune presence during formal, sitting meditation. After thoroughly relaxing our body, mind, and heart, we turn to sensing our body. First we sense parts of it: arms, legs, torso, and head. Then we move into sensing the whole of our body and staying with that wholeness. Once we feel grounded in whole body sensation, in body presence, we add to it.
We put some extra attention into our center of emotion, into the general region of our chest and solar plexus. We are there in our center of emotion, even if there are no particular emotions at the time. We are there in readiness to feel, in readiness to be our emotion, in readiness to respond with feeling. We stay with both, with whole body sensing and with attention to our emotional center. After having settled ourselves in both emotional and body presence, we add to that.
We place some extra attention into our head, into our mind, to establish ourselves in cognitive presence. We are in our whole mind, not just in our thoughts. We are there in our knowing, seeing, thinking, cognizing part. And then we stay with all three: sensing our whole body, emotional presence, and cognitive presence. Toward the end of the meditation period, we let all that go and allow the effort and energy to soak into our being.
We also wish to live our ordinary daily life in full presence. So we can practice entering triune presence at any time during our day when we have enough spare attention for it. As with the sitting meditation version of this practice, we begin with sensing our body, the whole of it. Then we add emotional or cognitive presence. And finally we add the third. With practice, you may be able to come into all three at once. So when you find moments during your day that do not require your full attention to whatever you are doing, you can try entering triune presence and staying with it. Ultimately you may find that triune presence does not detract from your engagement in your life activity. On the contrary, triune presence may add to your attention, so that you can do whatever you are doing more fully. But, of course we maintain the caveat that critical situations (e.g., driving, chopping vegetables) deserve our full attention without inner efforts of presence.
For this week, practice triune presence. Even if you are only able to enter such presence for brief moments, those moments repeated offer a taste of new possibilities, a new way of living.

OCCUPYING THE PRESENCE

The stool of presence may be stable with its three legs of presence in body, presence in heart, and presence of mind, but that situation is not complete. The purpose of a stool is for someone to sit on it. That someone is You, your I, your I Am, the agent of your life, the one who is present in your body, heart, and mind. It would be more accurate to say that the stool is not one of presence, but rather a stool of awareness — unless there is someone sitting on it. There can be awareness of body, of heart, and of mind. But without You there as the one who is aware, the one who is present, it is simply like a robot with sensors.
The core of presence is the one who is present, the one who inhabits your body from within, the one who feels your emotions, the one who cognizes through your mind, the one who lives your life and does what you do. Ordinarily we take this one for granted. We assume that we are always here as the one who experiences and lives our life. But even a cursory investigation reveals that sensory awareness, thoughts, and actions typically go on by themselves without “You.” This is particularly obvious in our automatic thoughts, which think themselves by association, without us thinking them or directing them or even necessarily being aware of them. Such awareness often comes after the fact, when we notice that a whole train of thoughts has arisen on its own and passed through our mind.
So this final aspect of the Path to Presence involves the practice of being the one who experiences and lives our life, the practice of being here at home in our center. Be the one who sees through your eyes, the one who is aware of your thoughts, aware of your mind, aware of your center of emotion. Inhabit your body. Inhabit your feeling. In habit your mind. Claim it all as your own. Instead of letting so many of your words and actions happen on their own in a stimulus-response cycle and without your participation, say what you say and do what you do. Engage and be who you are.
The subtlety is that who we are, our I, is will. And will does not exist in the same way that material objects or even energies exist. Will cannot be touched or seen or weighed or experienced. Indeed, it is will that does the touching, the seeing, the weighing, and the experiencing. Just as our physical eye cannot see itself, will looks, but not back at itself. Will acts but is not acted upon. But we can enter our will, our I, by being it, by being the actor, the agent, the seer, the decider, the director of our attention.
There are two levels in this. At the level of the conscious energy, we can be our I directly. We have a sense of wholeness and agency, a sense that I am the agent of my life, that I am the decider, the chooser, the experiencer — here in this moment. We feel ourselves to be the one who is here. We will our self to be and we are. But … this is not our actual I. We could call this our True Self [1]. And we would do very well to live in our True Self, more and more.
To get a taste of this, just ask yourself “Am I here?” And then you answer with full intention and with the whole of yourself: “Yes, I am here.” As you do so, be here, be the one who is saying this, thinking this. This is you, your True Self, sitting in the seat of presence.
There is, however, a deeper level of I, one which we do not enter directly, but rather one to which we can open, one which we can allow to enter us. The difference between True Self and I is where it begins. With True Self, we may feel ourselves to be our own source, to be our own individual self, separate from other people, from other selves. The transition to I occurs when we, as our True Self, open inwardly to the source just behind our True Self. We open our very core to let our own higher will flow into and through us, as us. That is our I, but is not so separate from other I’s. We recognize our I as fully our own, as who we really are, yet also as not just our own, but as connected at its root, at our root, with something vastly greater than us.
For this week, practice being your True Self, and even opening to your I. Be the one who lives your life, who makes your choices, who does what you do, and who experiences your experience. Rather than leave the seat of presence empty, inhabit your own center and complete your presence