Presence is spoken about by many and in many places, yet you might not know what is actually referred to as being present. We say that being present is primarily being free from the illusion of time. Time is a human construct that has been overlaid on experience. When you are in an experience, you are not in time; you’re in the sensations of the experience, the narration of the experience, and the duration of the experience. Your experience is not confined to the segmented understanding of time, because time is just an overlay of segmented understanding that has no real substantiality. It is an illusion. Thus, freedom from the illusion of time is freedom from any kind of attachment that causes you to limit or enhance your experience on the basis of this overlay, the construct that is understood as time.

Imagine that you were free of the construct of time. You would experience every encounter from its seeming start to its seeming finish, and you would be in the midst of that experience, always somewhere between start and finish, where there would be an infinite array of possibilities. If you cultivate an awareness of this infinite array of possibilities that exists between the seeming start and the seeming finish of any experience, you can cultivate freedom from time.

What we identify as presence is the understanding that the moment is really the only eternity that exists. Everything else is an attempt to order experiences and put them in categories identified as past or future. What is sometimes identified as present is fleeting. The present is only there for the moment that it is identified as being there, and when you identify a particular moment as being anywhere, you’ve lost the eternal aspect of that moment. You have set the moment within parameters that you have identified and defined based on your characterization of past and future.