What is presence of mind?

1.3 What is Presence of Mind?

Think of the the lack of consciousness while carrying out a domestic task i.e washing the dishes; I ask you to compare that to a prime minister making a decision whether or not to take the country into war. He or she would endeavour to be ‘mindful’ of all aspects of the decision. ‘Mindful,’ then, is a term we apply in order to determine whether one is morally aware or not. A component of what we have called mindfulness is awareness of the influential context, a primary goal in the educational system. This refers to consciousness to some degree of all the influences impinging on one’s current act – including attitudes, concerns, motives, goals and so forth.

However, awareness of influences does not consist in weighing the proposed act down with irrelevant thoughts, such as egoistic self-consciousness, but ideally emptying the mind of extraneous material. Of course, this state of mindfulness is a difficult thing to achieve. In yoga meditation, emptying of the extraneous is known as pratyahara. In this state of meditation, you just calmly observe internal or external disturbances. As you do so, they either cease to exist or to appear, or they at least cease to disturb us. In this way, our consciousness can settle and become more intense. However, this sort of idealism for consciousness is not without problems.