Meditation Beyond Mindfulness
Welcome to Presence, a place committed to exploring the profound awakening that is possible through meditation. This is not mindfulness as you know it. We are not learning to put our attention on the breath or bodily sensations to increase calm or improve productivity. Presence is about awakening to our true nature, our True Self, a wholeness that is transformative.
Hi, I’m Paul!
I’m the creator, coder, designer, and main meditation guide behind Presence. That’s right, everything you see was made by myself out of my love for sharing the realization of nonduality. This isn’t a large corporation monetizing meditation to make you more productive—this is a place to experience and practice authentic spiritual practice and uncover the miracle of consciousness and life. This isn’t cookie cutter meditation. This isn’t McMindfulness. This isn’t a secularized version of meditation. In fact it’s quite the opposite. This is a practice of meditation deeply rooted in faith concerned with one thing alone: Awakening.
Faith is a scary word these days. For many people escaping rigid religious upbringings that prohibited free-thinking and encourage blind belief, faith can feel incredibly dangerous. Faith can be interpreted as a kind of irrational belief in a traditional concept of God designed to control thinking and people. But there’s another kind of faith, a deeply necessary kind of faith, that frees us from the torment of our minds and allows us deep access to the mystery of Pure Being—the deepest dimensions of our own Self. This experience of faith is transrational, not irrational.
Just like our eyes cannot see themselves, so it is that the mind cannot know consciousness. Consciousness is not a thought, the Self is not an object. This is the perplexing territory we enter when we begin the pursue the path of awakening. Awakening to this reality beyond the mind, is something that is real and accessible. It doesn’t take lifetimes to achieve, you don’t need to meditate in a cave for decades. But it most often does take some “pointing out” from teachers and friends.
It’s my sincere hope that you will join us in exploring this extraordinary territory of the mind and soul. It’s my goal to be a resource for you, bringing all of the wisdom I’ve gained from my time as a spiritual seeker, a former Zen monk, and as a student of the nondual teacher Andrew Cohen.
Thank you for visiting Presence, I hope to see you on the cushion!
— Paul Bloch
A Lineage of Transformation
Our approach is based on thousands of years of spiritual transmission through the many schools of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Western Philosophy. We honor the countless contributions from awakened awakened people who have helped articulate and transmit the enlightened perspective. We also acknowledge the contemporary contributions of teachers such as Sri Aurobindo, Ken Wilber, and Andrew Cohen in helping to inform a spirituality that is inclusive of evolution and change. We recognize awakening is only the beginning of the path. Manifesting that awareness in this world is an endless evolutionary process.
