Experiencing the Seven Qualities of Awakened Awareness

Passionate Presence
by Catherine Ingram

Through her popular interactive Dharma Dialogues (dharma meaning "truth" or "the way"), Catherine Ingram has helped thousands of students in their quest for awakening by encouraging them to give up the quest and let their own "heart intelligence" guide them in life. Through her work, Ingram has found that most people are imbued with "passionate presence," but often overlook it because they are searching for something more dramatic elsewhere. In this book, she invites readers to simply to relax into their own passionate presence and the innate awakened qualities that come with this relaxation: Silence, Tenderness, Discernment, Embodiment, Authenticity, Delight, and Wonder. With illuminating anecdotes and personal reflections, she describes the seven traits, imparting a sense of the mystery of the world through direct experience, rather than through expounding any particular belief or tradition.

Passionate Presence takes us on a heart journey that is an immediate experience of seven awakened qualities, speaking directly to the inherent wisdom within each of us. Inspiring and profound, it is a sojourn into the timeless wisdom secretly known by all.

Over the millennia the search for meaning and belonging has been humankind's most fervent pursuit, and to that end religions and philosophies abound. Yet, in our time, many people feel alienated from all religion and philosophy, sensing them to be based in superstition, dogma, or hierarchies of power. The need for meaning and belonging remains the same, yet the traditional options for fulfilling that need have less and less appeal. In desperation, we have turned to consumerism, technology, and celebrity voyeurism as our new religions, and these, too, have proven unsatisfying. The modern world, for many, has become a soulless place.

Out of this disappointment comes a large and growing interest in finding meaning that is not based in beliefs or traditions, but instead relies purely on direct experience. Many people sense the spiritual, the mysterious breath of existence. Yet, though they sense the mysterious, they remain grounded in reason. Rational mystics, I call them. It may seem to such people that they are alone in their view, that they are not fit for either religion or the marketplace. They may feel that they are not fit for this world at all.

I know well the loneliness that comes when one no longer feels part of a spiritual tradition yet is wary of a purely mechanistic or biologically determined view of life. Some years ago I experienced an existential depression that lasted several years and fostered a cynical view of reality. Having previously been on a spiritual journey since the early seventies, I had studied with renowned teachers in Asia and the West and had immersed myself in a worldwide community of meditation practitioners, primarily in the Buddhist traditions. In addition to rigorous meditation practice, we studied what in Sanskrit is called the dharma, which loosely translates as "truth" or "the way." For over a decade I had also worked as a journalist specializing in consciousness and activism in order to have access to and, in a sense, private tutorials with some of the great spiritual leaders and thinkers of our time.

These were heady years of feeling part of a growing spiritual movement. But there came a point when none of it made sense anymore. All religious beliefs began to fall away and seem nothing more than fairy tales attempting to assuage anxiety about the purposelessness of existence and the fear of death. This falling away of beliefs occurred completely on its own and was the last thing I would have wished. After all, it is very comforting to have a nice coherent story about the purpose of life and a belief in the hereafter. Instead, I plummeted into a vision of reality that was pointless and heartless. Having long since seen the futility of finding peace in the pursuit of power or money, and, now, set adrift from any connection to dharma, I felt a stranger to every world. I no longer spoke the language of my oldest and dearest friends, and a cold desolation engulfed me.

The silver lining of the cloud of depression is that it sometimes opens us to fresh perspective. When our strategies have failed and we have found no consolation in any quarter, we can either fall into madness or into realizing that what we have always wanted-a passionate aliveness at peace in itself-is, strangely enough, found in a simple shift in perception.

In my case, meeting my teacher, the late H. W. L. Poonjaji of India, awoke in me a clarity that objectively viewed the story of my depression and pierced through it to underlying peace, dissolving the depression along the way. Poonjaji exhibited a possibility of living in the quiet center of one's being while remaining fully engaged in activity. His was a passionate expression of life, devouring its delights while remaining aware of its tragedies. Nevertheless, one sensed in him a silence that the world did not touch.

Despite my many years of meditation practice, I had never experienced silence in an ongoing way. I had tried to come to silence through techniques of taming the mind, and that had been futile. Yet now all effort to still the mind fell away and my attention began to effortlessly rest in the silence beyond thought. Crazy thoughts continued, but interest in them lessened. Movements of mind, emotion, fear, or elation became as waves on an ocean of peace. An acclimatizing process began to occur on its own. Just as mountain climbers, when approaching a high altitude, must spend time camped at points along the way with no particular task other than to let their bodies adjust to the new altitude, I could feel my awareness adjusting to silence while doing nothing to assist it. The silence did all the work, just as being at the higher altitude does the acclimatizing work for the climbers.

Within this silence, I also began to feel a pervading presence in everything, and a feeling of love overwhelmed me. I realized that I had always felt intrinsic presence and love on the periphery of my awareness; it was completely familiar. Pure presence is our fundamental experience, even when we seem to be lost in the stories and activities of life. Like breathing, it is taken for granted. Yet it is what we most clearly remember when we think back to the earliest times of our existence. The details of our past may be fuzzy, but being itself is clear. At the ages of four, ten, twenty, or ninety, what has or will most consistently define our experience is the simple fact of being and, if we go deeper, a feeling of love.

I remembered this feeling from my earliest days with my Italian grandmother, Caterina Versace, who died when I was seven and who had been like a mother to me. We would silently walk among the blue hydrangeas in her yard, and everything inside and out appeared to be glowing and shimmering. This all seemed perfectly normal at the time.

But, as I grew older, I somehow lost the sense of it. Although the awareness of simple presence and love was there all along, I overlooked it by searching for meaning and purpose and promises of life ever after. On meeting Poonjaji, the search fell away and in its place an appreciation for mystery and an awakened awareness emerged. I was overcome by the sensation of underlying unity. Everything was in its place-just so.

This understanding conveys a sense of belonging. I recognized that we are not merely interconnected; we are suffused with the same essence as that of everything. Steeping in this sense, we no longer spend our time clutching to what is turning to dust or chasing abstract ideas, such as meaning and purpose. We walk in a sense of totality; the world being entirely our own. It is not that we possess it but that we are it. Like water into water.

There is a story about a little fish who swims up to his older and wiser fish friend and says, "You go on and on about water. I have been searching for it everywhere and it is nowhere to be found. I have studied all the texts, practiced and trained diligently, and met with those who have known it, but it has eluded me." The wise old fish says, "Yes, dear. As I always tell you, not only are you swimming in it right now but you are also composed of it." The little fish shakes his head in frustration and swims away, saying, "Maybe someday I will find it."

We are so like the little fish. We search everywhere outside ourselves to try to find ourselves. We collect experiences, relationships, knowledge, and objects. We hope for recognition from others to validate our importance. But while we may have found pleasure or rewards in various ways, we have often overlooked our greatest gift, hidden in plain sight-our own passionate presence. We overlook this gift because we are so busy searching elsewhere for something more. As long as we depend on an enhanced sense of ourselves to be happy we are likely to be disappointed. Telling ourselves stories about what is missing forces us into a relentless pursuit of desires akin, as Poonjaji would say, to beasts of burden driven by a madman. Happiness comes in relaxed simplicity, living in present awareness, and contentment with this life that is granted.

Because it is simply what is so, this view comes effortlessly in deep relaxation. When striving is exhausted (usually through disappointment) and we no longer hope for anything outside ourselves to make us feel whole, we may begin to notice a startling quality of aliveness-how fulfilling it is just to be-and this sense of being infinitely extends and includes all of existence.

Copyright © March 2003, Gotham Books, a member of Penguin Putnam, Inc., used by permission.

About the Author

Catherine Ingram is a renowned dharma teacher who has been leading Dharma Dialogues and retreats since 1992. She is a cofounder of Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, considered the most prestigious Buddhist center in the West. She is the author of In the Footsteps of Gandhi: Conversations with Spiritual/Social Activists and has contributed articles to O magazine, New Age Journal, East West Journal, and Yoga Journal, among other publications.