Does Presence Require Us to Be Serious

Does presence require us not to be too excited about something? Is presence serious? Don't laugh. I see being too excited about something as weakness and I feel presence should be strong. Please explain the relationship between the two. No. Well, presence does not require you to be. Not to be excited about something. It doesn't require anything. Well, there are certain requirements for presence to arise. And that is, for example, finding the gap between two thoughts once presence has arisen. Presence doesn't have requirements. It doesn't say, now you must be serious. There's a related question, but I don't know where it is. Sometimes nice to answer two questions in one answer. It could be anywhere. Well, I'm sure you have seen the. There's a little symbol symbolizing the theater, which. The origin of this symbol, which has two images in it, goes back to ancient Greece where theater first started. The actors in ancient Greece wore masks and there was a mask for a smiling mask. And there was also. There might have been others too. And there was the sad or miserable mask. And traditionally, to symbolize, you can even see it at the entrance to some theaters you have the two masks, smiling masks, and next to it a miserable looking mask. And that symbolizes comedy and tragedy. And so the excitement that you mention here would be the smiling mask. Wow, it's all going so well. It's great. I got it. Are you excited about going to Costa Rica? Somebody asked me and I said no. And that person didn't understand how one could not be excited about going to Costa Rica. So that's the positive excitement. And then there's the negative excitement of, oh, I'm in Costa Rica and I got stung by mosquitoes and I've got diarrhea and it's too. And there's the drama. That's also an excitement, the negative excitement of drama. What he did to me, what you do, I won't forget that. So it's not that presence requires you not to be excited. There's a natural thing that comes as presence arises more in your life, you still. You take pleasure in the good things and you have a. You would rather have something nice than something not good. So when something sad happens, something might make you sad, you go, oh, but there's no longer these extremes. That is an overvaluation of conditions, circumstances, an overvaluation of. Of circumstances in your life, either on the positive or on the negative. Now, I like to think you have a third image because we have the smiling and we have the miserable mask. And that is the good Buddha images. And you might have seen Some on the good Buddha statues or paintings, and as you may remember I mentioned what that really represents is not a person who lived 2,500 years ago. It represents a state of consciousness. And on the good paintings and the high quality inspired statues, the Buddha always has a slight smile on his face. It's not the big smile of the the happy mask, but it's a hint of a smile. And then you get some not so good Buddha images where the Buddha looks deadly serious, almost scary. So that's that hint of a smile of the Buddha points to another state that is neither the positive excitement nor the negative excitement of drama. It's something deeper that again we come back to the vertical dimension. The Buddha. Buddha is a state of consciousness, the awakened state. The word itself means to be awake to the awakened one, the one who is awake, and that's you. So the vertical state is the state of depth. And when you are rooted in the vertical, you are not swayed so much anymore by either. When something good happens, you go. And when something bad happens, you go. You still appreciate the good and when the bad comes, you accept what is and you can enjoy the good and you can accept the so called bad. And it's not even good and bad anymore. If your mind doesn't label what happens in your life, it is this moment is as it is. And so I can enjoy going to Costa Rica and being here and even to some extent look forward to going there a little bit and at the same time, or more fundamentally be rooted in that deeper sense of presence. And out of that arises that strange thing or no thing that produce that causes the Buddha to smile. And that's a kind of flow of joyful aliveness that has nothing to do whether or not you're going to Costa Rica or whether your trip is cancelled and even diarrhea won't affect it too much, although on the surface it doesn't feel so. If you're rooted in the vertical, then this extremes, the extremes excitements just naturally don't occur anymore because the overvaluation of circumstances doesn't happen anymore. If you over value circumstances, then you've always very quickly experienced the other polarity. What makes you happy today makes you unhappy tomorrow, or what makes you happy today doesn't make you happy anymore tomorrow because you got used to it. Or as very often the case, a mental projection of what is going to make you happy when you achieve doesn't work. Or if it works, it works for just a short time course in miracles mentioned somewhere that you can always recognize an egoically motivated goal in you by the fact that when you reach doesn't satisfy it.