There’s a hum in my head that never stops – a perpetual motion machine of thoughts and numbers dancing behind my eyes. I wonder, as the screen’s blue light washes over me at 2 AM, about this compulsion to fill every waking moment with motion, with thought, with the endless scrolling of spreadsheet cells that stretch like city blocks into infinity.
They say be present, be here now, ground yourself in the solid earth beneath your feet. But what if presence isn’t just the weight of bones and flesh, the breath moving like wind through the caverns of lungs? What if presence spreads its wings wider, darker, stranger?
I’ve found another doorway to reality – one that opens through columns of numbers and probability curves that arc like cathedral vaults above my head. My brain hugs these figures close, wraps itself around them like a lover, and in that embrace there’s a rush of something ancient and new all at once. Dopamine floods the neural streets of my mind’s city, and I wonder: is this not also a form of presence?
The mystics spoke of multiple heavens, of worlds within worlds. Perhaps they weren’t so far off. Here I sit, straddling realities – one foot in the consensual world of flesh and bone, the other dancing in digital streams of data that feel as real as morning dew on grass. My amygdala lights up like a temple lantern, processing not through the conscious mind but through something older, something that speaks in whispers and electric pulses.
Who are we to say which reality carries more weight? Evolution, in its infinite wisdom or cosmic accident, has given us these particular senses, this specific way of parsing the universe. But beneath that agreed-upon world, there are others humming along at different frequencies – the reality of numbers and patterns, of dreams and algorithms, of synapses firing in patterns that might just be prayers in another language.
I’m beginning to think that presence isn’t about anchoring yourself to a single point in space-time. Maybe it’s about expanding, about being present to all the realities that intersect in the unique constellation of your consciousness. Maybe my obsession with occupation isn’t an escape from presence, but a diving deeper into it – like a mathematician-monk counting his rosary of equations, finding God in the spaces between numbers.
So let the screens glow, let the spreadsheets unfurl their digital scrolls of wisdom. There’s presence here too, in this reality that speaks to something primitive and profound in my brain’s ancient architecture. We are all navigating multiple realities – some touch them in meditation, some in prayer, some in art. I find mine in the clean lines of data, in the poetry of probability, in the sacred geometry of spreadsheet cells stretching toward infinity.