The realm of One Life is most closely associated with an understanding of nonduality, but it's not necessarily completely or totally aligned with specific descriptions or understandings of nonduality. We use the term "One Life" to speak about All That Is without any sense of partitions or separations between anything, without attempting to elevate it into a place that you try to go to or try to achieve, or without trying to make it into something that has no meaning or value. We want to keep the whole sense of what One Life consciousness is as a very neutral, nonexperiential, nonverbal, nonconceptual understanding that is literally accessed only through the intuition.

Presence Is Just Being

Presence is basically the preliminary experience from which one's intuition can gain a sense of nonduality or One Life consciousness. Yet even presence is very difficult to describe or to identify as something, because, actually, presence has a great deal to do with nothingness — not the kind of nothing that you find after looking for something and failing, not the kind that means that nothing exists, and not a kind of nihilism, but a kind of nothing in terms of the understanding that it takes something to organize, label, identify, and articulate the nature of reality. And in a deep or true state of presence, all of the things that are being used to organize reality — your perceptions, your concepts, your feelings — take on a very aleatory and transitory sense to them. They seem more arbitrary, more impermanent. They come and go. They seem to come from nothing and return to nothing.

So in a deep or true state of presence, the sense of it all is that there's no real story to get hooked on. There's no real feeling to try to sustain or try to remove. There's no sense that what you're really doing is even meditating or sitting in presence. If you have to ask if you are in presence, then you are not in a state of presence.