What is "What Is"?
Presence is a state of consciousness, of being, in which we have a pure, sensed, direct experience of What Is.
There is What Is — the isness of existence free of any thought-based interpretation — and there is the fictional universe that springs to life in the mind of each person, born out of whatever conditioned thoughts and stories we carry about What Is. Our thoughts and beliefs form an overlay that distorts our perception of reality and blinds us to the truth of the moment.
We believe those story-based worlds are fully real when we have become identified with our also fictional egoic mind-made sense of self. And that illusory sense of self gets lost in a perpetual dream-like world where thoughts, interpretations, labels, judgments and dramas are believed to be real, typically resulting in suffering that comes from chaotic thought-based emotions.
Awakening takes place when we realize our true nature, see through the illusion of our mind-made stories of self and world, and live from that state, in reality, in What Is.