Presence

by Gaston Saint-Pierre

 In your presence, there is neither beginning nor ending, only an exhausted absence, a nowhere where the void is not, a negation of formlessness. And yet matter and formlessness, space and the space-less, time and the timeless are subsumed in it. The mind says: In your presence … as a means to appropriate intelligence to itself by making it distinct. If there is a “your” then there can be a “my”. If there can be the space-less, the timeless, then, the mind thinks, there can be form given to the formless, as if the mind’s means of presence that is thought could replace presence.

Experience, knowledge, nothing but past traces dissolving in the breathlessness of presence, memory holding on to its multifaceted structure in order to ensure progression from darkness to light, from ignorance to knowing, from absence to presence. But metamorphosis mocks all these attempts, for nothing can be reached. There is neither a from here to there, a from then to now. No continuity in Presence, for Presence is forever present, a gift that cannot be given.

Be joy, action, truth, silence, repose, total in verticality so that the planes can divulge their fullness of being. Be luminous and know the transient quality of aspects of being. Embrace the ambiguity of appearances and yet relate in weightless intensity to the structure-less scaffoldings of shades and shadows, of echoes and harmonics in the effortless caesura of presence and Presence. Be still in the elusive silence and know there is no transition possible, no evasion, just immediacy.

Be not the body that demands of life its sustenance but the one that defines the abundance of life. Be not the mind that seeks the transcendence of thoughts for they are still matter in disguise but the one that revels in the challenge of the ending of itself. Be not the emotion that ensures direction but the one that knows no circumference nor centre. And with infinite tenderness invite them all to the power feast as the knives, forks and spoons, fingers, toes and sinuses intimating a dimensionless agape contrived by Presence for its own amusement.