The ordinary experience of consciousness seems continuous. A stable “I” moves through time, memorises, anticipates, links moments together in a coherent narrative. This continuity is real as experience — but it is not primitive. It is constructed.
Attentive observation reveals structural discontinuities in conscious experience. These discontinuities are not failures. They are inherent to the functioning of attention, which proceeds by saccades, reorientations and micro-absences.
What the Laboratory designates by the term “presence” is not a continuous and unperturbed state of consciousness. It is the capacity to quickly recontact a point of observation after these inevitable discontinuities — to “return” without drama and without particular effort.
Observable discontinuities
- Micro-absences: brief suspensions of observation, often not themselves conscious.
- Register shifts: automatic passages from direct perception to verbal thought, or from the present state to a memory or anticipation.
- Attentional misses: moments when attention has engaged with a content without the decision to engage being conscious.
Presence, understood as the capacity for return after discontinuity, is trainable. Not by attempting to eliminate discontinuities, but by modifying one’s reaction to them. This is not a trivial observation: it substantially changes what one seeks to develop in an observation practice.