A Dharma portal is a gateway to the direct experience of the essence of mind which is pure and total presence in immediate awareness. It is not at all what we may be thinking about at any given moment.
When we are lost in our thoughts, experience reveals, we are often totally distracted and truly, as the saying goes, entirely ‘absent minded’. We are certainly not present.
Presence is being in the experiential flow of the moment, without grasping at sensory impressions or clinging to our interpretations and judgmental labels. Presence really isn’t even confined to a moment at all. It’s in the continuity of awareness itself, which is timeless.
This Dharma-log will explore some of the portals of presence. It is said that there are at least 84 thousand. It’s unlikely that we should be able to consider more than just a few. However, through collaborative contributions more portals could be discovered.
Meditation can be, but unfortunately, is not always a portal of presence. Simply being attentive to immediate awareness, however, if we could call this meditation (or is it non-meditation) opens the living experience of presence; alert, relaxed, undistracted awareness.
Presence itself is a continuously renewed immediacy. Sensory impressions and thought forms adventitiously arise and yet always vanish into the stillness from which they arose. How marvelous this is to behold! Try to see!
From this vista, gazing out across the infinite expanse, we learn that the totality of our experience is transient and impermanent. The only continuity is the presence in which our experience manifests.
This presence is always and ever imminent, empty yet manifesting the universe of appearances and possibilities. It is the very essence of pure being.
This Dharma portal leads us to the direct recognition of the primal awareness of pure being. Having been introduced we need only familiarize ourselves with this infinite expanse. This is presence.
