Presence Is Paramount | The Essence Of Healing And Spirituality

In this provocative discussion, we investigate the role of presence in healing and spirituality - connecting the dots between the moment, neutrality and being in the heart. We also explore how we can understand presence through the lens of energy field dynamics. If you enjoy interdisciplinary approaches and the "bigger picture" of meditation, healing and spirituality you're sure to enjoy this talk!

Transcript

Hello,

My name is Keith Parker,

And we are going to have a discussion about the core skill in energy healing.

And that is the skill,

If you could call it that,

Of presence.

So I'm going to talk about presence from a number of different angles,

Some of which are more experiential and some of which are more about the mechanics of the energy field and how awareness and attention direct the flow of the energy field.

And I am the founder of a modality called field dynamics,

And we go into this extensively in our training and the overall importance of how the modality is integrative.

Now I don't want to limit the importance or give a narrow band impression of what presence is and just keep it within the framework of energy healing.

Presence is essentially what all of spiritual development is about,

And it's also one's ability to be in the moment,

In what is actual or in the digestion of experience.

Presence is the thing that puts you in touch with being here and now.

And when we deeply investigate the importance of being here and now,

We find out that purpose and meaning and our understanding of how it is we can achieve,

How it is we can be in the world with deeper purpose and meaning is all accessed through the present moment.

So being here now,

We're all familiar with that.

Now what firstly takes us out of being in the moment?

What does that even in a sense,

What does that mean to not be in the moment?

I mean,

Your body's always here,

Right?

Well,

The other part is the mind.

Now,

All meditation,

All meditators are well aware of what the mind is doing.

When you look at the mind in how it's naturally functioning,

Its default settings,

The mind is rather scattered.

Its nature is to dart this way and that,

And to,

We might say that the mind has a mind of its own.

Sometimes it's called the monkey mind or the waterfall.

But simply put,

When we sit down and we look at the mind,

When we develop our ability to observe how our attention,

How the mind is moving its focus,

What is naturally occurring is that it goes all over the place that is beyond our choice.

No one can say,

Mind,

Stop moving now.

That doesn't happen.

Now,

The practice of meditation brings about the skill development of settling the mind to greater and greater degrees.

And it can have a very high correlation with the stilling of the physiology as well and the refining of physiology.

But the important thing to make note of is that ultimately we can't choose what our mind does.

So what can we do if the mind is the thing that takes us out of the moment,

Then how is it that we can become more in the moment?

What is it that changes that enables a person to be more here and now?

Well,

The word attachment is commonly used in traditions such as Buddhism.

Another word that we could understand is disidentification.

Yet another is observational presence or witnessing.

Now,

Imagine if you continue to develop the ability to see thought rather than be thought.

Being more present may simply be described as not being identified or attached with the movements of the mind.

I refer here to a famous translation by,

In the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali in which one of the very opening stanzas defines yoga as yoga is the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind.

So the mind is constantly fluctuating.

And the yoga or the being here and now is about the stilling of those fluctuations.

Now again,

That doesn't mean that the fluctuations necessarily only go away,

But rather that something that is still versus fluctuating remains as the anchor of the experience.

That is a good way to think about it.

There is something that's not the mind that is here.

And that is what we're usually referring to as spirit.

That's what we're referring to as awareness.

Now this is a framework that is regularly used,

A kind of a triangulation between the body and the mind and the spirit.

And it explains a lot.

And that is certainly the framework that I work with and that I understand through my experience.

And that is simply that there is a quality of being which may be simply pure being.

And that beingness is what we relate to as spirit.

And it doesn't necessarily have an assignment,

A preset assignment,

I.

E.

That awareness is not necessarily of your mind or of your body.

That awareness is rather pervasive.

It is allness.

It is beingness.

It is infinite in nature.

And it is the very thing that suffuses all points in space and time and goes beyond that.

Now I am working with an understanding of mine and if the introduction or orientation around a kind of omnipresence in a sense is antithetical to your belief systems,

Then just consider it.

Consider it as a framework.

Consider the possibility that the mind and the body of ourselves as humans is actually suffused or subsumed within a greater being,

The whole being of the whole universe and beyond anything that we could think of as subject and object.

That is certainly what spirit is.

It is the neutral or the triangulation or the non-dual aspect that is present always.

So,

Let's get back to what it might be like to be more present.

Now the main thing here is for understanding,

We want to not be attached to the mind.

So those fluctuations come and go,

But we continue to anchor,

We continue to develop our ability to be at the level of the awareness of the beingness and that beingness which you can understand directly by simply watching a thought.

If you,

For a moment,

If you watch your mind and you notice a thought arising and you notice that you are not that thought,

The aspect of you that can be aware or witness the thought is the awareness that comes before the thought itself.

And it is this common practice in many traditions that anything that is seen,

Anything that has a structure,

An object that is even a component of your subjective experience,

That anything that can be seen is not it.

It is not spirit.

It is not you,

Your deepest you.

So what might it be again to be more in the present?

Instead of being attached to or drawn into the discursive mind of the thinking mind,

Maybe it's simply that the perception of the awareness itself that one's lens is clear enough that they don't get pulled into discursive thinking.

They don't get pulled into false identification with the mind.

Rather,

The present being is simply in a state of is-ness or now-ness.

Now this brings us to the funny paradox of what it means to be here now.

You see,

Now is not a capturable object.

Now the now,

The present moment,

If you try and capture that,

There is no way of saying that something is more now than another now.

You see,

The now is simply eternal.

So where can we go now that we've kind of touched into this idea of the eternal present?

Eternal,

It's interesting.

There's a quality to something that gets us to paradox.

You know,

Eternal is similar to infinite.

Infinite is something that doesn't have a necessary beginning or ending.

It doesn't have a volume.

It doesn't have an amount.

And this is a bit confounding to our conceptual mind and our rational mind.

So the present moment is very similar to the idea of the eternal or the infinite.

There's no way of grasping it.

It is just ever present or its nature is absolute versus relative.

So how can we connect this into energy field dynamics?

Now this is quite a different place that we're going to go.

Now I have a well-developed perception of the human energy field and I can see the electromagnetic aspect of it and how it spins and rotates in relationship to thought and mentation.

So not only is this the framework that I'm going to present,

Not only is that something I can anchor in my direct experience,

It also is completely aligned with an understanding of physics,

Of energy field dynamics at the much more mechanical level that we're familiar with in the material realm.

But I'm going to speak of it in terms of what's happening at the level of mind,

At the level of the human energy field.

There's an important component to becoming more present with regards to the energy field and that is its level of coherency.

Now coherency is an indication or a measure of the level of the organization of a system.

So your energy field can be more organized or it can be more disorganized.

Now for instance,

You may be familiar with the term an energy block or you may be familiar with the term a fragmentation from shamanism for instance.

What these are pointing at is where there is discordance,

Dissonance,

And a lack of coherency in the energy field.

Now why might that become a problem for being present?

Let me explain.

Being present is greatly assisted by having a coherent energy field and a coherent energy field produces the experience of presence or the ease of access to presence in a person because coherency means the energy field can spin to center.

So this energy field is always rotating and it can only rotate outward or inward.

Now that inward rotation is a centripetal force.

Things move to center.

Now we're going to get somewhere with this.

We're going to get somewhere,

I promise.

For those of you who are not so interested in the energy field dynamics,

You'll see how this connects to the qualities of our being.

So our energy field spins to its center.

Now this centripetal force coheres naturally.

It pulls everything in and that centripetal inward spiraling force naturally reorganizes things.

And in a sense,

It's as simple as saying the centripetal force causes negentropy.

Now negentropy is the terminology which describes a self-organizing system.

In physics,

The common term is its opposite,

Which is entropy,

Which is how the entropy of the universe is only going up.

So there's only more and more disorder in the universe.

But what we find is with biological entities that they seem to be negentropic systems,

I.

E.

The biological system seeks to maintain a self-ordering structure to mediate against the disorder of decay and aging.

So our biology and our mind-body system seems to be embedded or designed in a sense as a negentropic system.

It wants to become more orderly.

It seeks to have more strength,

More complexity,

More interconnectivity,

So as to extend its survival,

So as to extend its longevity.

So this spinning to center ultimately has to go through the core of our energy system.

And what is in the core of the energy field?

Well,

It is our heart.

And no matter what tradition you go to in the world,

No matter what practitioner who's had enough experience you go to,

Everyone knows that at a certain point,

Deep work always needs to be done in our core and in our center of centers,

And that is our heart space.

So how can we understand why it is that the present moment is more accessed by being more in our hearts and how that has to do with energy field dynamics and the paradox of the now,

The paradox of the eternal?

Again,

Referencing the energy field,

It has positive and negative charges.

It's an electromagnetic field.

It's made of light.

So it has electrical charges,

A positive and a negative pole.

Now,

The center of the field has a neutral charge,

Is a neutral point where the positive and negative aspects are nonexistent.

So think again,

Refer back to the oddity,

The paradox of the now.

It is not capturable.

It has this quality of not having a movement this way or that.

It just always is.

In the same way,

The analog in our energy field is our heart,

Because the heart,

As we understand when we say true love is being expressed,

We say it is unconditional love.

So unconditional means there is no circumstance where the love isn't present.

So that non-circumstantial love,

That unconditional love,

We can understand electrically as neutral,

Neither positive nor negative.

And this is a redefining of love for many of us to understand that true love being unconditional is not a good or a bad thing.

It is an is thing,

Just as the now is not the past or the future.

It is a present thing.

So you can see these triangulations mind,

Body and spirit,

Positive,

Negative and neutral,

Past,

Future and present.

These triangulations often reveal at its center point a kind of a paradoxical situation.

Now,

The mechanics of being in the heart is that that centripetal force,

That self-organizing force goes up.

So if you place your attention in your heart,

What happens is your energy field starts to suck to center.

And you could say that love sucks.

Yes,

It's a kind of spiritual hoover,

If you will.

And staying in the heart center and developing more and more ability to anchor in the heart means that your energy field pulls to center.

It means that the coherency goes up.

It means that you naturally become more present without the effort of trying to be present.

So the key step to getting to love is compassion.

Compassion is the quality that invites the energy field.

It is a state of being to practice compassion.

It is a state of being that naturally breaks down the barriers that keep the heart from being available to be accessed.

Now,

In some sense,

Forgiveness is associated with the word compassionate,

To practice compassion more and more deeply to the subtle levels where we have a hard time being in a state of acceptance and understanding of a circumstance or of others.

Forgiveness starts to thread in and become enmeshed with compassion at a certain deep level.

But it is this quality of compassion,

Which is so highly regarded and emphasized in certain traditions that helps us develop to develop our quality of unconditional love,

Which is really the quality of neutrality.

So when I speak of this all in relationship to energy healing and of course healing in general,

And as mentioned,

As really the essence of all spirituality,

It is that when we sit and we meditate,

Or when we are moving around in life as it presents itself,

And we situate ourselves in our heart,

And we allow ourselves to become more open,

When we soften ourselves,

When we develop our compassionate observational presence of whatever is arising is okay,

And we keep anchoring our awareness in the present moment through our body,

The energy field keeps spinning to center,

Stronger and stronger.

The energy field keeps cohering more and more.

And as that keeps developing,

One not only builds more and more presence,

But avails themselves of releasing,

Of clearing the energy blocks,

Of clearing the fragments,

And of feeling very importantly,

Feeling those things which have been fragmented.

It's almost like being in the heart.

What it does is it is it is inviting in the feelings,

It is inviting in also the perspectives and thoughts that have been pushed away,

That have been repressed or suppressed or forgotten.

And so all of this leads to being more present,

Being more in the here and the now.

Now I don't think there is really anything that has more value than the self-development around presence.

That may also mean that I'm suggesting,

In my opinion,

That there's nothing more valuable than developing oneself spiritually.

But again,

What are we referring to when we say we're developing our spirituality,

Our spiritual self?

We're talking about the awareness,

The pervasive eternal awareness that is,

That is now,

And that is neutrality and love.

Thank you so much for listening.

I hope this was a stimulating talk.

Many blessings on your journey.

Reviews

Thank you for yet another inspiring and clarifying talk 🙏✨

A rare clarity! I enjoyed your explaination of key elements of the spiritual path.

Beautifully stated. This is possibly the clearest explanation I have ever heard or read, that also coincides perfectly with my experience. Therefore, for me, this talk points directly and concisely to truth. Thank you.

Many gems in this interesting talk. 🌀 ✨

Thank you Keith. You are an excellent educator. I love how you tie different planes of experience together. I wish I could see the energy you see. In lieu of that, your talks really help me understand a lot.