Presence and submission
To be present to oneself is to offer oneself the present time, the source of integrity. Submission denies this presence, stealing our vital energy. Little by little, it empties our existence, closing the door on our integrity.
The gift of presence
To be present to ourselves is to offer ourselves the present of present time, that is, the gift to ourselves of our own integrity. Integrity lies in the way we inhabit time, in the light of our capacity for action.
- We are only active in the present. We cannot act in the past, nor act in the future.
- Submission to authority, threat, fear, etc., is the negation of our integrity. In other words, we deny our present time, only to have it snatched away by someone else.
- Submission therefore only takes place through our modality of presence in the present.
Submission and absence of self in time
I propose this way of looking at the phenomenon of submission, which is different from the political or psychological way in which we usually look at the phenomena of domination and submission. In this approach, when we submit, we relinquish our presence in time. We leave our time to the other.
And yet, we can experience extremely strong emotions in these moments, in our experiences of submission. But we absent our integrity within time, and so we can no longer receive its present.
We’re in time, of course, but we’re no longer in integrity with ourselves, we’re no longer “aligned” with ourselves, and so what takes place there is no longer a gift we receive, which builds us up. As we biologically exist in this time, it opens a breach, a leak, and our vital energy pours out of us during the time of submission. Submission can be to many things; it’s not just submission to a malevolent person.
And little by little, time after time of submission, our vital energy is reduced, until it disappears. The habit takes hold, and we no longer even know how to be present in time, or how to offer ourselves the present of the present through our presence. Our integrity has been drained, our existence is no more. The door closes.
Presence as the fundamental grounding of our being in the world
Presence constitutes this fundamental grounding that connects us to ourselves and to the world, this quality of attention that transforms lived experience into inhabited consciousness. To be present is to resist the centrifugal forces that disperse us - the imminence that projects us into urgency, the denial that cuts us off from reality, the social injunctions that distance us from our interiority. Presence is neither withdrawal into oneself nor fusion with the exterior, but this creative tension between inner grounding and openness to the world. It is cultivated through paradoxical adaptation that requires sometimes absenting oneself to better find oneself again, through the complex geography of our inner states that vary according to contexts, through resonance with the waves that pass through us. Faced with drama that fractures, submission that empties existence, old age that isolates, presence becomes resistance and reconstruction. It is what allows us to transform the unexpected into opportunity, to maintain our integrity in turmoil, to create connection where solitude reigns. Cultivating one’s presence ultimately means offering oneself the present of the present moment, the source of all authentic transformation.
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Presence and submission
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H A film by Benoît Labourdette (2’39s, 2025).
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Out of time Calligrams
