Presence Isn’t Passive: Why Jesus Flipped Tables Without Losing His Shit
How force, clarity, and love coexist when ego steps aside
That moment wasn’t a holy tantrum—it was precision.
Cynthia Bourgeault, in Practicing Living Presence: Discovering the Mind of Christ Within, teaches that true presence isn’t passive. It isn’t emotional flatline or forced chill. Presence is consciousness wide enough to contain action without being consumed by it. It’s the stillness that moves when movement is required.
Holy Rage Without the Hangover
When personality runs the show, anger comes with side effects: blame, righteousness, and regret. But when essence leads, energy flows clean.
Jesus didn’t lash out because someone insulted him. He wasn’t personally offended. What he saw was a desecration of harmony—a distortion in the natural order between spirit and commerce—and his response came from clarity, not reactivity.
That’s what Bourgeault calls acting from the Real I, where essence and personality work together in right alignment. The outer self becomes an instrument instead of a weapon. Presence doesn’t suppress emotion; it purifies it.
The Two Ways We Misuse Anger
There are really only two bad relationships people have with anger: repression and indulgence.
Repression is when we swallow our fury in the name of being “spiritual.” We smile politely while resentment brews beneath the robes. It’s not holiness—it’s emotional constipation dressed as enlightenment.
Indulgence, on the other hand, is when we unleash it raw, mistaking catharsis for clarity. We feel powerful for a moment, but afterward the body knows it was poison.
True presence sits in the middle of that paradox: feeling everything without being it. The monk can chop wood with force but without hatred of the log. The surgeon can cut without cruelty. That’s what Bourgeault means when she says essence must train personality to serve. The action remains fierce—but clean.
Force vs. Anger
Anger is what happens when ego gets hijacked. Force is what happens when love takes the wheel.
In the temple, Jesus wasn’t triggered—he was tuned. He moved with the precision of someone completely present, not defending an identity but serving reality itself. That’s the difference between spiritual bypassing and conscious action.
Presence can roar. It just doesn’t react.
Imagine trying to clear a protest line or confront an injustice with full compassion—firm, not cruel. That’s what clean force looks like. It’s not “don’t make waves.” It’s “be the current.”
Jesus as Presence in Motion
Picture the scene again: dust, shouting, coins scattering across the stone floor. The air crackling with the energy of disruption.
And yet—within the chaos—Jesus breathes once, moves exactly as needed, and stops when the work is done. No gloating, no sermon, no self-justification.
That’s what pure action looks like when it’s free of identification. He didn’t defend a belief. He enacted a harmony.
This is the “Mind of Christ” Bourgeault is pointing toward—the state where inner stillness and outer movement fuse. Where doing arises naturally from being. Where love is strong enough to strike.
Presence isn’t passivity; it’s motion aligned with mercy.
The Myth of the Nice Mystic
Somewhere along the way, enlightenment got rebranded as emotional sedation. We’ve mistaken meekness for mastery, as though the goal were to become so “spiritual” that nothing moves us anymore. But numbing isn’t transcendence—it’s avoidance with better PR.
As Bourgeault reminds us, the higher self isn’t conflict-averse. It simply operates from a different center. When the ego steps aside, energy flows through the personality cleanly, like light through glass. Sometimes that light illuminates. Sometimes it burns.
Both are love.
The Power of Clean Action
Presence doesn’t mean you never flip tables. It means you don’t flip them from identification. When you act from essence, your action is surgical—no residue, no aftertaste of drama.
True consciousness allows “a wide field of awareness,” Bourgeault writes. You can see the whole moment—the emotion, the energy, the need—and respond without collapsing into any of it. The result is clarity with teeth.
Presence has boundaries, not walls. It doesn’t tolerate abuse, but it doesn’t need to demonize, either. It speaks truth without venom. It’s the rarest form of strength: one that doesn’t need to prove itself.
The Inner Temple
Try this the next time you feel rage or righteous fire rising:
Pause. Feel the heat without judging it.
Locate yourself. Are you defending your ego or serving truth?
Act cleanly. Do what needs doing, then drop it. No post-fight mental reruns.
That’s the modern version of temple work—clearing out the inner money changers who trade authenticity for approval, who sell peace at the cost of presence.
You’ll know you’re acting from essence when your heart feels clear afterward, not clever.
The Mercy Beneath the Motion
Presence isn’t just clarity—it’s mercy in motion. Every force that arises from love carries healing in its wake. The whip and the wound both serve awakening.
Bourgeault ends Chapter 5 with this gem:
“Whoever makes all cares into a single care—the care for simply being present—will be relieved of all care by that presence.”
That’s the paradox: when your only care is to stay awake, even your anger becomes prayer.
The divine doesn’t need your politeness. It needs your precision. It needs you awake enough to see where love must flow next, even if that means shaking the walls of your own comfort.
As Virgin Monk Boy likes to say, “Even saints need a moment to rearrange the furniture of illusion.”
Presence isn’t passive. It’s a living current—sometimes a whisper, sometimes a storm—but always love doing what love does best: restoring balance.
If this reflection stirred something real:
It draws from Practicing Living Presence: Discovering the Mind of Christ Within by Cynthia Bourgeault, based on Kabir Helminski’s Living Presence: A Sufi Way to Mindfulness and the Essential Self.
Both are manuals for remembering that holiness doesn’t hide from the world—it inhabits it.
The Point Isn’t Perfection—it’s Partnership
You don’t dissolve the personality; you civilize it. Essence and personality, working together, give birth to what Gurdjieff called Real I—the presence of God expressing through a human life without distortion.
So yes, keep your inner Border Collie. Just don’t let it drive the car, run the church, or post on Facebook after midnight.
Presence doesn’t need to chase. It already contains the flock.
If this reflection made you smile or breathe a little deeper, you might love the source material:
Cynthia Bourgeault’s Practicing Living Presence: Discovering the Mind of Christ Within, based on Kabir Helminski’s classic Living Presence: A Sufi Way to Mindfulness and the Essential Self.
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A powerful contemplation. You have
distinguished with amazing clarity between the ego’s reactive fury and the conscious, precise movement of Presence.
This is a living demonstration of what it means to act from the “Real I”. The image of Jesus flipping tables without losing center is a potent mirror for all who mistake spiritual maturity for passive acceptance.
A brilliant reflection of what it means to be both fully human and fully awake.
Thank you
🙏🙏
I'm still learning a lot about presence and this has helped me. When you write 'The monk can chop wood with force but without hatred of the log' I reflected that when chopping wood if I'm angry I'm more likely to injure myself than chop the wood effectively.