A DEEPER SENSE OF BEING PRESENT

“All see what you appear to be, few experience what you really are.” (Marcello de Souza, C&V)

We are relational beings, constantly immersed in affectionate connections. It is through these relationships that the characteristics of our world are determined. Uniquely, they chart paths, expressing outcomes through our behaviors. Our entire consciousness is also a creation. Through our relationships, we shape our thoughts. Thought is both constructive and constructive of knowledge. Our thoughts build our consciousness, and with it, knowledge. Knowledge is the reason for our existence.

The science of our existence makes it possible to perceive that life is formed by continually virgin moments. We live in a process of successive opportunities for transformation. We are not what we were yesterday, what we are today, and the only certainty is that we will be different tomorrow.

“If each man is, in some way, responsible for the state in which he lives, he himself will also be, in some way, responsible for how things arise.” (Aristotle)

The more conscious we are of ourselves, the more realistic we are, and therefore, the greater the insight to deal with transformations. This is because the future is not a place we are going to, but the place we are creating every second of life through our validated relationships. Purposes. The path to it is not found but constructed from choices, and the act of having it determines us as BEINGS and writes, line by line, part of our destiny. However, everything changes: society, behaviors, codes, beliefs, relationships, our own truths, our own thoughts, and the perception of our own existence as who we are. There are so many transformations that sometimes we cannot cope with all of them. This is why, from time to time, things slip away, and slipping away does not mean that we are letting life slip through our hands, but rather that we must always be prepared, committing to the exercise of choices to move forward.

Anguish, the feeling that accompanies our choices, is a paradox between the prison and the freedom to choose. If anguish accompanies us, then it is necessary to know how to value better to choose and thus reduce the anxiety of living. Value for our own decisions. To value, it is necessary to recognize, and living is a condition for knowing. Without knowledge, there is no value. Without value, there is no meaning. It is necessary to value life so as not to fall into the fantasies of having to make decisions just for the sake of making them, leaving aside the opportunity of our own choices because most people made that or another decision. It is action that reveals the truth about the deepest intentions when true values are expressed.

When we learn to value life, we exercise the condition of being present. We come to understand that our choices were the only ones they could be, and that our beliefs and convictions are not the most correct answers but simply our answers. That truths are only possibilities and that we are built at every moment through a unique trajectory of life itself. When we understand what value is, we accept that in life, nothing is static, everything changes, and changes are inevitable for survival. Each of us is destined to have our own character, to be exactly what no one else can be, and to do what no one else can do. But there is a tendency for man to almost always follow the same path. Even so, the challenges are great, the changes inevitable, and the chance of being surprised by chance will accompany us to the end.

There is no ready, written, and defined proposal for life; nothing is fixed or already deciphered. The fact of partiality to a constancy is what leads to being biased towards fleeting rather than enduring paths. This is because perhaps following paths already constructed is simpler than building one’s own path. Everything that is simpler, is addictive. In our journey, there are more vices than virtues, and we continue to seek the easiest ways to live.

The problem is that when it comes to finding our identity, how do we know who is deceiving whom. Are we who we are by the simple act of living, or are we what we build through the effort of living? If we are elaborating a path for ourselves, indifference cannot be a premise. What we accomplish in the fullness of our past life, in the abundance of experiences, this inner richness, nothing and no one can take away from us, and they are the reason we have arrived here. It is necessary to experience to live. Perhaps this is why appearance does not represent the legitimacy of being who we would like to be, and this pursuit of glory loses all meaning when it is realized that it is of no use to appear when it is not, because at some point, the desire for recognition ceases to make sense; at some point, we are unmasked not by others but by ourselves.

A Deeper Sense of Being Present

Why do so many yearn for the illusion?

The act of fantasizing, of deceiving oneself, is not merely an exercise in self-deception, nor is it a deliberate action of mistakes and guilt. Instead, each of us, by nature, employs deception as a survival tool. We deceive and are deceived. In other words, we are immersed in a world of beliefs, values, expectations, desires, dreams, and it is around these dreams, desires, expectations that we make our moves, leaving others behind. There is a systematic approach to human relationships in which we deal daily with the expectations of one another. And sometimes, if we do not remove the fanciful idealism and face life in a raw and direct manner, we almost always end up harming our relationships, considering them as deceit because the expectations we deluded ourselves with were not met. Neither from one side nor the other!

Machiavelli says: “It is necessary to climb the hills to recognize the plains.” This reference underscores the importance of the effort we must put into life. For this, it is necessary to be present in one’s own life. Being present is also a value. It is the ability to be conscious in the now, which becomes crucial for the relationships we maintain with the world. The lack of presence envelops us in limiting beliefs, temporality, and the illusion of being what we are not. From this moment, we lose freedom, because it is us, it is our decisions.

What is the mystery of “being free” that everyone talks about, but almost no one seeks?

To be free is not to be a slave to ignorance, not to be a hostage to the actions and deliberations of the means in which we are involved. Therefore, the necessary discernment of freedom enables man to recognize his sovereignty in being free. It is necessary to recognize one’s inclinations to act better and to be free to choose. Introspection. Recognizing one’s limits, weaknesses, and imperfections is not an easy exercise, but it is necessary so that it is possible to take the reins of life, not expecting chance to intervene in our relationships. Not justifying by beliefs, miracles, eternal questions, stars, metaphysical reasons, which can somehow govern and define the possibilities that persist in our path in life. It is necessary to be aware of being responsible for preferences so as not to deliberately live with mistakes and act as if we did not know why we acted that way.

“No matter what life has made of you, but what you do with what life has made of you.” (Sartre)

There is much we do not know, much we do not perceive, and so much more that we are not even aware of, it’s true. However, there are just as many things that we know, feel, endure, experience, and that have brought us here, and these, undeniably, we are responsible for. Hence, the importance of introspection. In it, we find out who we are, or at least an important part of ourselves. The immeasurable feeling of encountering the unknown and awakening to a new identity. Of transparency of Being.

In an optical system, transparency is the property of being transparent, that is, allowing light to pass through. Here, transparency represents clarity to seek the best choice, and to express ourselves ahead in agreement with ourselves and not to manifest in front of others’ wishes. Lack of clarity does not favor thinking and limits us from freedom!

The opposite property of transparency is opacity. To be opaque is the same as following beliefs that perpetuate us. Opacity is when autonomy of thought is taken from us, filtering certain information. In the absence of transparency, we incorporate other information as our own, even if not produced by us. There persists a deviation between ideals of virtue and what would be conducive to a practice, a pursuit of the common good, and a simple condition of interests to survive.

We are continuous beings. Being continually means that we change several times. We only notice changes when present. Which leads us to admit once again that our absence as a present BEING often leads us to the servile habit of not living our own choices to follow the desires of others. A path that always brings with it a false sense of security, generating fantasies of comfort and delusions of self-confidence and well-being. Of course, even if for a moment, one is absorbed in the ease of living. Of its responsibility because it is only following a majority or someone admired. Which does not mean that this absolves you of judgment because everyone does it this way.

What do we understand by responsibility? Are we aware of the consequences of our actions or even our omissions? Of our interference in others’ lives? We cannot shelter ourselves in the belief of collective guilt or absolute absolution when many or almost all have erred. We become capable, by virtue of our own work, of building or destroying; it’s always an individual choice. The vanity that corrodes us proposes an excess of wanting without power, and everything becomes urgent without wanting to broaden the horizons of responsibility for what we propose to ourselves. In truth, simple ignorance of a situation or refusal to act as thought does not make us free from responsibility; we are continually BEING, and as beings, we are responsible for our actions, and submission is an increasingly heavy burden that ignorance makes us carry eternally.

Consciousness is creation, so freedom only exists in the condition of thought. If at certain moments in life we are lucid with our presence, then you are capable of observing around you, seeing what your choices are, and from there understanding the value of life. Who we are and how much we are the other, but not only that. In other words, much of what we are displeases us, and even so, we do not give ourselves the chance to transform a life without grace, lukewarm, disillusioned, into something better. In the condition of presence lies resilience. Resilience not as an imperative attribute, but as the capacity to think as a plural being, valuing one’s own life. Let us make this moment an opportunity. Let us remove the masks and the fanciful idealism and face life in a raw and direct way.

May it be for one time, one moment. As a form of challenge and reflection. Who knows, this may lead us to something truly better, a moment of lucidity. Life is not a fairy tale; reality is often divergent from our perspectives, and introspective realism only exists for those who do not live under the condition that there is an ideal world. Fantasy is also a prison. It is the reason for many of our illusions and much more of our disillusionments. When deluded, we shirk our responsibilities. When disillusioned, we start looking for scapegoats, blind to the conditions created that brought us here.

And what brought us here? If we have come here, it is because in some way we allowed it; there was some gain in accepting it to be so, even rhetorically pretending to be unaware, hypocritically hiding from our own responsibilities, as a certificate, certifying the reasons for life with our own illusory blindness of not wanting to be who we really are. It doesn’t matter what you want to believe in, but these choices to recognize who you really are and your responsibilities in life are the omnipresent condition for the quality of your relationships with life. And it is the quality of relationships that will draw the real value of life. Relationships give meaning to always seeking the virtues that make us better. The meaning of life is in relationships; we are social beings. It is relationships, affections, that compose the construction of our path. Without them, there is no sense of existing, just as we would not survive much more than a simple regret. We deduce from a much greater meaning of happiness than from moments that saddened us, that caused pain or suffering. No one is happy all the time, but we can all recognize moments of happiness. Happiness is timeless while only existing for an instant. It is not eternal in time, but it eternalizes in our thoughts, in our history, and in our relationships. The quality of a successful life is precisely allusive in these moments.

As for the paradoxes of happy people, well, they are materialized in the works of suffering as a representative authentic value of the meaning of living. The real values of a well-lived life. Knowing how to draw valuable lessons from pain and suffering, from moments of unhappiness and anguish, are the basic principles of a happy life. It is from there that we learn to build our own path and make a difference.

The world is full of people alike; what is lacking are differences, and if you are not able to understand the meaning of unhappiness, you are not able to understand life, much less what it means to be happy. The meaning of differences lies in the way resilient people build bridges between present difficulties and a more complete and well-built future. These bridges make the present manageable, turning efforts into feelings of joy, and so nothing is impossible to deal with. Know that we can because we are plural in essence and singular in a universe, and we have to give the testimony and respect for the singularity of others so that the meaning of life continues to be the freedom of our own choices.

It is true that we end up being dominated by imperative teachings, and the essence is no longer life, but techniques for living. To this view, we oppose another:

“Technique is not the domination of nature; it is the domination of the relationship between what we are and what we want to be.” If our thoughts form our consciousness, then let it be in the experience of living the practice of testimony, born from this accumulation of desires and transformations, and that can affect new models of thinking about relationships with the world. More than ever, it is time to face the experience of suffering of those crushed by the machinery of our models of progress and technique and listening to the lament of the relationship that could serve as weapons against our own perception of the world. More than a discourse on sustainability, we need more authentic, true, critical, and revolutionary affections. It is the experiences that brought us here and that lead us to seek to build an ethics of responsibility and care; it is when the need arises to discuss and think about the role of living testimony of the freedom of one’s own life that one must be present to understand our relationships.

Our thoughts build our consciousness, and with it, knowledge. Knowledge is the reason for our existence. It is what gives meaning to life. It is freedom. This means that we, in this space, have the right to believe in the expectation of miracles, not because we believe religiously in miracles, but because men, as long as they can act as singular beings, are able to achieve the unlikely and the unpredictable, and they do so, continually, whether they know it or not, and this may be our reason for the true miracle, which is to live!

“If the present time were not good, it would not be called present. It is the only gift we have.” (Daniel Munduruku)

Questions to promote self-reflection:

1. What are my main responsibilities in life? Am I taking on these responsibilities consciously and proactively?
2. How do my choices and actions affect not only myself but also others around me?
3. In which areas of my life am I seeking growth and transformation? What steps can I take to move forward in this process?
4. How can I cultivate more authenticity and resilience in my personal journey?
5. What are my greatest sources of happiness and meaning in life? Am I prioritizing these areas?
6. What patterns of thinking or behavior are preventing me from reaching my full potential? How can I challenge and overcome them?
7. What are my core values, and am I living in alignment with them? If not, what can I do to align my actions with my values?
8. How can I find a healthy balance between accepting reality as it is and seeking positive changes in my life?
9. What are the main challenges I am currently facing, and how can I approach them with a growth mindset and learning attitude?
10. What can I do to cultivate more meaningful and fulfilling relationships in my life?

These questions can serve as starting points for deep and meaningful self-reflection, helping to promote self-awareness and personal growth.

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Hello, I’m Marcello de Souza! I started my career in 1997 as a leader and manager in a large company in the IT and Telecommunications market. Since then, I have been involved in important projects structuring, implementing, and optimizing telecommunications networks in Brazil. Restless and passionate about behavioral and social psychology. In 2008, I decided to dive into the universe of the human mind.

Since then, I have become a professional passionate about deciphering the secrets of human behavior and catalyzing positive changes in individuals and organizations. Doctor in Social Psychology, with over 25 years of experience in Cognitive Behavioral and Human Organizational Development. With a diverse career, I highlight my role as:

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My solid academic background includes four postgraduate degrees and a doctorate in Social Psychology, along with international certifications in Management, Leadership, and Cognitive Behavioral Development. My contributions in the field are widely recognized in hundreds of classes, training sessions, conferences, and published articles.

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