What keeps you from being present?

I'm not fully present when I'm so pulled into The Game that I take it to be reality.....and this tends to happen when I take one element in the environment....my lover's body for example..and abstract this lovely figure from the ground from which it emerges...the shower....I react with indifference to the streaming water coming out of the nozzle (that's the water coming out of the shower head reader, okay?)....but I'm very much into the body that's reaching for the towel (into = attracted, okay? I'm not there yet.).....so I got nice nice bod and neutral background and so now I got this horn the size of the Rock of Gibralta and no way am I going to be doing anything other than thinking about how I can make love to this bod over the next 30 minutes.....

In these 30 minutes, I will be in the grip of lust..in other circumstances, it could be rage or grief....we tend to react emotionally to the stuff we pluck out of the environmental basket and cradle in the palm of our hand...and then we have lost the ability to be fully present (although many make a case for being present whilst having their emotions but that's another debate)........

In order to be fully present, it is necessary to view the Whole Sheboodle with equanimity which means thwarting the impulse to break stuff down into the likeable and dislikeable....this state makes one far more prone to experience what is really happening rather than whatever meaning one shades into the phenomenologiccal colouring book....and what happens, what is always happening, is that The Game unfolds frame by glorious frame dripping with a seductive form-glory......and, in fact, the Game is not Life-snakes and ladders but Hide and Seek and to be fully present to emptiness hidden by a form which is inseparate from it.