The Yoga of Radiant Presence is about noticing the actuality of our experience. It's about recognizing that our experience, or all reality, is made out of something I call radiant presence. This term is just a designation, a way to refer to the actuality of what is.
Radiant presence is always present, always here. It's the field of experience that is real and undeniable. It presents itself as experiential characteristics, always showing up as something. It can be colors, sounds, thoughts, subtle vibes, or anything else you might experience.
This radiant presence is infinitely subtle and unresolvable. It's beyond any heavy-handed interpretation or definition we might try to impose on it. It's a transcendental field of presence that is always fully manifest, yet we often don't notice it because of our pre-established patterns and interpretations.
The essence of this yoga is coming to identify and notice this radiant presence. Once you notice it, it clearly and obviously conveys its nature, granting realization and liberation. It's about seeing that all seeming coarseness is actually a transcendental subtlety.
So, in essence, the Yoga of Radiant Presence is about recognizing and being with this presence outside of interpretation, outside of an interpretive framework, outside of a context that you're holding it to be. It's about noticing the actuality of this condition and letting it reveal its nature to you.
Now, how does this resonate with your own experience? Have you noticed moments where you've been aware of this radiant presence?
The sources below helped generate your response ...
- The essence of this yoga, what I call this yoga, the yoga of radiant presence, is the development or more accurately the realization of sensitivity to subtle energy.
Sensitivity to what is called psychic phenomena. Sensitivity to nuances, let's call them experiential nuances that are not normally classified within the normal human, you know, framework of qualifying what's going on here.
It turns out that what this is consists of a vast, literally infinite sea of, call it energetic phenomena, you know, subtle qualities.
And we experience these qualities, let's call them the lower frequency or the denser aspect of these qualities as what phenomena we think of as physical.
So we see, you know, we see bodies, we see the environment, we hear physical sounds, you know, and so on and so forth.
But if one becomes aware, if one becomes sensitive to one's experience carefully, one will notice a vast range of actual qualities, experiential flavors or qualities or what have you, we don't have language for this, that do not correlate to specific physical phenomena.
And ordinarily within a normal human framework, these are written off as noise, you know, noise in the system or fuzz or just, you know, whatever.
But in actual fact, it's not like that.
Source: 2014.zip: 2014 Spring Retreat4... - Good evening, welcome.
The fundamental point of the yoga of radiant presence is
presence. What is it that's present? What is it that is here?
What is here that is the point of all this?
It is absolute reality. God, the divine, the transcendental.
It is all right here, it is all available.
And that's the point of this or any other yoga, otherwise it's just
mind games to amuse yourself.
But the power source, so to speak, what energizes it, what makes it valuable,
what makes it actual is the fact that there is something that is here,
that is available, that is powerful, that is effective,
that is intrinsically embodying and manifesting everything
that you may aspire to in any of this stuff, in spirituality.
So, the presence of absolute reality is actual, it's concrete.
The presence of divinity is actual, it's concrete.
The presence of God is actual, it's concrete.
And that is the powerful fact.
That is what enables this to be effective, this to be actual,
this to be, as I said, anything other than a game,
a silly lifestyle pretense or something to imagine or something to aspire to.
And the fortunate fact, as it turns out, is that reality is actually
already completely manufactured, completely here.
This is real, this is reality.
This presence, the presence that you experience as your presence,
the presence of your experience is the presence, it's the presence of actuality,
it's the objective presence of reality itself.
Source: 2013.zip: 2013 03 19... - Now, the yoga of radiant presence is noticing that fact, noticing the undeniable actuality of this fact,
and in that simple noticing, in that simple recognition, it communicates immediately and directly its nature and its implications,
its flavor, if you will.
The fact that it is, your experience is this boundless bubble, floating in nothingness, that all of reality appears in.
I mean, who you are, here's the bubble of your experience, what's it sitting on, what's it sitting in, what's holding it up?
It's just here, and everything shows up in it, and comes and appears and disappears and so on,
but this bubble is just here, floating in nothingness.
It's a given, you can't make it more here or less here, you can't turn it on or off, it's just here.
And everything, all of reality appears within this, all this informational content, appears and disappears.
You go to sleep, the world disappears, your body disappears, your history disappears, you start dreaming there's a new world, a new body, a new history, whatever.
I mean, who knows, right?
Source: 2014.zip: 2014 10 18b... - I've noticed that, that, how to say it, moments of presence will kind of
hit and texture. They kind of like, sort of dawn on me. And I think in the past, I would,
you know, go, I want more of them. I know, gotta hang on, you know, that kind of thing.
And now more, it's like, it's really nice, and I want to, I like it, but it's more just
appreciating it and hanging out with it rather than grabbing. I guess that's more of a feeling
that, oh, that's where things really are, or maybe where I should be, but that's where
things really are, as opposed to like an anomaly.
Yeah, and this is, you know, this is the, you know, the vector of yoga engagement at
that point. You know, initially one is just trying to get any kind of, discover any kind
of transcendental actual experiencing. Oh, wow, this is great. You know, that's what
I want. I want more of that. I'm going for that. But as one's experience deepens and
one has a greater range of the breadth of the fact that experience is like that always,
whether it's being attended to or not, one comes to, again, one comes to see that the
quality of actuality, you know, unresolvability and so on and so forth, what I call radiant
presence is inherent. It's objectively the case. You can't get rid of it. You don't need
to find it.
Source: 2017.zip: 2017 12 16... - I mean, you know, again, I'm calling it, just to have something to talk about,
I'm calling it the Yoga of Radiant Presence, because that's an evocative name
and it's actually fairly accurate in many ways.
But it is the spiritual process and there is no other spiritual process.
And all spiritual processes that look different than that, if they're genuine, are actually that.
And they may have superficial trappings that involve wearing funny clothes and adopting funny names
and saying and doing funny things, but none of that is actually of the essence of what's actually happening.
It's actually doing the work.
So this is sort of the stripped down on steroids version.
No prostrations, no Sanskrit names.
I mean, you can do all that and that's fine, it doesn't hurt the process,
but it doesn't actually add to it, it's just trappings, it's just, you know, lifestyle choices.
[silence]
The only thing that actually does anything, the only thing that's actually effective is what I call noticing,
which is being with this presence to some degree outside of interpretation,
outside of an interpretive framework, outside of a context that you're holding it to be,
which is always a revelation.
And this happens, again, all the time for everyone.
You know, anyone whatsoever from time to time sees a beautiful something and goes, "Wow!"I mean, they may go, "Wow!"
Source: 2012.zip: 2012 10 26retreat3... - I call it Yoga of Radiant Presence because this that is here, the actuality of your experience of field that is real, that is here, is present.
It's undeniably present, it is. There's no debate about that, it's simply self-evident fact.
And this presence of experience, this field of experience, always presents as experiential characteristics, always presents as something.
It can be colors or sound or light or thought or subtle vibes or whatever, but it's never just, it never ceases, it's never nothing.
It can get very very rarefied, like if you're in deep sleep, or say you're in heavy general anesthesia, or maybe after death, it's very very subtle and rarefied, almost like nothing, relative to the heavy handedness of the waking state.
But in actuality, it's always full, it's always full of characteristics, and this I refer to as radiant, it's always radiantly presenting itself as something, as innuendo, as suggestion.
And interestingly, you can never resolve what is presented. This is the mind's game, the mind is endlessly trying to pin down exactly what is present and exactly how it's presented.
First of all, it's too unstable and fleeting in time to be resolved, and second of all, there's too much information, it's infinite.
You can't tell what anything is because the closer you look at it, the more you find. So you never get to the bottom of it.
Now I know everything about it, I know what this is.
Source: 2014.zip: 2014 06 22retreat... - What's interesting for me is when the sense of radiant presence is more vivid, I can't
even find body, mind, it's all just labels.
It doesn't really relate to anything.
There's just the sense of presence which is completely outside of any designation.
It's really just a matter of perspective.
Heavy-handed defined, very concrete-ized version of oneself as a body, as a personality, as
a living in an objective three-dimensional space and so on.
It's really just a conceptual perspective that is an overlay, it's a conceptual overlay
on this transcendental field of presence that is infinitely subtle and infinitely unresolvable.
I started talking about it.
There's nothing here but light itself.
Light is all that's being experienced even though the mind's heavy-handed interpretation
interprets it as a world, as thoughts and effect, as complexity and stability.
Whereas the actuality is a subtlety and a dynamism and up to the unrestricted spontaneity
that is always fully manifest.
But we don't notice it because of this heavy-handed definitional overlay.
That overlay is like a bunch of, this is just a crude metaphor, but like a bunch of rabbit
holes that suck the attention, the mental energy down into the pre-established patterns.
I guess yoga in the sense that you're describing it is just learning to recognize that.
Not just to stand free or to stay clear of those traps.
To see that all of this seeming hoarseness is actually a transcendental subtlety.
Source: 2020.zip: 2020 11 05... - Good morning everybody. Welcome. Thank you for coming.
The essence of the yoga of radiant presence is coming to identify what radiant presence is.
Coming to notice the actuality of this condition.
Once you notice the actuality of this condition, it clearly and obviously conveys its nature.
In so doing, this grants realization and liberation.
Radiant presence is what your experience, what all reality is made out of.
I call it radiant presence, obviously that's just a buzzword, it's just a made up name.
It isn't actually that, it's what it is.
But it's a useful designation so we'll play with that for now.
Coming to discover that reality, that your experience is made of something radically different
than anything you may think, may be able to think that it is, is what does the magic.
Because it turns out that any and all ideas that you may have about what you are,
about what this is, about what reality is, are completely and entirely wrong.
Simply because it's impossible to have an accurate idea.
So categorically any idea is wrong because what this is intrinsically is by its nature infinite, transcendental,
completely ungraspable by ideas, by thought, by conceptualization.
So therefore by definition any idea you have is inaccurate.
It's not necessarily completely wrong, but in this case a miss is as good as a mile.
So the whole crux of the issue is what is radiant presence?
What exactly is?
Source: 2013.zip: 2013 09 07intensive... - The means of the yoga, the means of the yoga
and the goal of the yoga. So you're using the goal as the means. Presence refers to
sexuality. This presence, this is presence. It is radiant in that it unceasingly and intrinsically
presents itself as an infinite spectrum of qualities, which we all know. Experience always
looks like something. Even if you're in deep sleep it looks like something. In a dream
it looks like something. Every moment of your waking life looks like something. This something
is the radiance. I call it radiance because, as Michael said, it's a fulgent. You don't
need to go to it and try to coax it out. On the contrary, it shines forth like a spotlight.
All these characteristics force themselves into your experience. Obviously that's a little
heavy-handed. But they shine forth. Color shines forth, light shines forth, sound shines
forth, unstoppably it radiates. It's a radiance, an unstoppable radiance. Thought appears. Thought
radiates unceasingly. Sensation, subtle qualities that we don't have names for continually wafting,
drifting through the field of experience. It's unending radiance. And the radiance is
within and of this presence, this actuality, this field of experience. So, yoga of radiant
presence is simply noticing the fullness of this actuality, which is not particularly
difficult to do because you're always doing it. You're always experiencing your experience,
but it simply means that. So it's a matter of just feel it.
Source: 2013.zip: 2013 02 04...