Why It’s Easier to Scroll Than to See: The Cost of Presence
We are addicted to automatic energy. Presence costs more than we think.
We live in a culture designed to keep us slightly hypnotized. Phones, notifications, endless content, and digital noise all pull at the same part of us that already loves the path of least resistance. It feels easier to scroll, react, and distract ourselves than to actually notice what is happening in the moment. The mind drifts, the attention tightens, and we slip into states that feel like awareness but are really just subtle forms of sleep.
This reflection grows out of Practicing Living Presence: Discovering the Mind of Christ Within. Cynthia Bourgeault explores why presence feels so costly in our time, and how our culture is dominated by automatic and sensitive energies rather than conscious attention. Helminski describes these energies with striking clarity, and the transcript makes the point even more sharply. Most of what we call awareness is not conscious presence at all. It is conditioned response repeating itself without supervision.
You can see this even in small things. On a silent retreat, Cynthia watched people maintain silence perfectly until someone bumped their foot in the food line. Their first response was always “Sorry.” The conditioning was so deep that it bypassed intention. The whole room became a series of whispered sorries. It was funny. It was also a perfect metaphor for our entire culture.
We think we are choosing. Most of the time we are simply running programs.
Automatic Energy: The Default Setting of Modern Life
Helminski describes automatic energy as the conditioned responses that operate below conscious choice. We adapt to our environment and then replay those behaviors without noticing. Over decades the layers grow thicker. The mind builds grooves, and we live inside those grooves without seeing them.
Scrolling your phone is automatic energy.
Arguing the same way with the same person is automatic energy.
Tensing your shoulders every time you get an email notification is automatic energy.
Buying things when you feel lonely is automatic energy.
Repeating the same inner judgments about yourself is automatic energy.
The ego loves automatic energy because it lets it stay in charge without effort. It feels like life is moving, but nothing is actually happening. There is no presence, no seeing, and no real choice.
If you want to understand why spiritual work feels difficult, start here. You are trying to wake up inside an identity built on momentum.
Sensitive Energy: The Illusion of Aliveness
Sensitive energy is where things get more confusing, because it feels elevated. It includes strong emotion, inspiration, excitement, artistic immersion, and those moments when you get completely absorbed in something you love.
It looks like presence.
It feels like presence.
It is not presence.
When you are deeply lost in a song, or a book, or a memory, or a daydream, the attention becomes narrow and intense. The world disappears. The sense of “I” disappears. There is only the object of attention. It can be beautiful. It can even be intoxicating.
But as the transcript explains, your attention is consumed by the thing you are noticing. You are not aware of yourself noticing it. You are not aware of the room around you. You are not in the wider field of consciousness. You are in a tunnel.
Sensitive energy is how most people chase unitive experience. They try to disappear into intensity. It works for a moment. It never lasts. And it never leads to real transformation because it is still the ego at the center.
It is easier to scroll than to see because scrolling activates both automatic and sensitive energy. It keeps the mind moving enough to feel alive but not awake enough to be free.
Conscious Presence Costs Something
Conscious presence is different. It has a wider field. It sees the object, the surroundings, and the one who is seeing. It includes the breath, the sensations in the body, the emotional tone of the moment, the relationship between you and the event. Presence is not consumed. Presence is aware.
This form of attention is more spacious and less dramatic. It is not as intoxicating as sensitive energy. It does not sweep you away. It requires will. It requires a slight inner shift. It requires a choice.
The transcript says it plainly. At any instant in your life, it is easier not to be conscious than to be conscious. You cannot drift into presence. You cannot coast into presence. You have to decide it.
This is why contemplative practice feels awkward in the beginning. You suddenly have a small observer inside who notices your reactions, your impulses, your postures, your emotional weather. It feels like looking at yourself from the outside. Cynthia calls this the “observer eye.” It softens as it matures, but you have to pass through the awkward phase first.
People quit here because they think the awkwardness means they are doing something wrong. It actually means they are finally seeing themselves.
Our Culture Rewards Sleep, Not Seeing
You can feel this everywhere.
The speed of communication.
The rush of emotional drama online.
The demand for constant reaction.
The pressure to identify with every thought.
The temptation to escape into intensity.
We are trained for automatic and sensitive energy.
We are not trained for presence.
The culture rewards what is quick, loud, and reactive. Presence does not offer a dopamine hit. It offers clarity. And clarity is not always comfortable at first. Clarity introduces choice. It interrupts momentum. It slows down the part of you that is terrified of stillness. It removes the emotional rush that comes from being carried by habit.
Presence makes you aware of the thing you were trying not to feel.
This is the real cost.
Presence will show you the reality you tried to scroll past.
The First Move: Start Noticing Your Conditioned Responses
If you want to begin working with presence in a real and grounded way, start with the simplest skill. Start noticing what is automatic.
You do not have to fix anything.
You do not have to judge anything.
You only have to see it.
Here are a few places to begin.
1. Notice what your body does without your permission.
Jaw tightening.
Shoulders rising.
Breath shortening.
Hands clenching.
Scrolling as a reflex.
Seeing it breaks the spell.
2. Notice the moment your attention gets consumed.
Not curious.
Consumed.
They are different states.
Sensitive energy feels like flow.
Presence feels like space.
3. Notice the chain of reactions.
Someone speaks.
Your stomach flips.
A thought fires.
A narrative forms.
You react.
If you can catch even one link in the chain, presence enters.
4. Notice the voice in your head that narrates experience.
This is the ego running the script.
You are not the voice.
You are the one who hears it.
5. Notice how often your attention leaves the room.
Presence always brings you back to the actual moment you are in.
Presence reconnects you to reality.
Presence makes you available to yourself.
This is the groundwork of conscious transformation. As Cynthia says repeatedly, the most important part of the spiritual path is the moment when you finally start to see your own life.
The Path Forward
Presence is a willed skill.
Presence is a learned skill.
Presence is the beginning of interior freedom.
This is why inner work takes courage. Not dramatic courage. Simple courage. The courage to stay when the mind wants to run. The courage to see what you usually avoid. The courage to tell the truth to yourself in real time.
It is easier to scroll than to see.
That has always been true.
But once you taste what it is like to actually be here, even for a moment, the old movements lose some of their power. You begin to sense that something in you is capable of more than automatic reaction. Something in you is capable of conscious life.
And that is the part the inner tradition calls forth.
That is the part the transcript is training.
That is the part that begins to grow each time you choose to be present.
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I get the Automatic Energy. But I am confused with the Sensitive Energy vs Conscious Energy only in the context of artistic creation. When I do my art, I am often engulfed in the creation I am making. I also often feeling like I am still open to inspiration from the aether during the process - so not a total insular state. I am not seeing how some of the artistic work could be done watching yourself do it, not being tuned into the process or having your attention be more concentrated in the "nowness" of where you are when you are creating. What connection am I missing in this?
Thank you for sharing your wisdom, Brother V. We’re receiving lessons from the monastery, without having to go to the monastery!🕉️