The Nature of Consciousness

To begin with, the outward world seems to be infinite and inexhaustible, but if we pursue it far enough we inevitably come to the conclusion that it is consciousness itself that is infinite and inexhaustible. The outward journey wears itself out, and then the inward one beckons. If you try saying this to a sceptic, you run into the same objection: ‘Go stand in traffic. When a bus hits you, you’re dead. End of story.’ Materialists keep insisting that the physical world comes first and that no amount of tricky mental gymnastics can get around that fact. Even sympathetic listeners and committed seekers cling to materialism – perhaps secretly, perhaps guiltily, but mostly, I think, because the full story has yet to sink in. In his gentle but uncompromising way, Spira insists upon telling the full story and beyond that, making it an immediate personal experience.

Vedanta’s promise can be stated in a single maxim: ‘Know that one thing, by knowing which, all else is known.’

He has one thing to say because there is only one thing to know: It’s all consciousness. Because consciousness is creating everything, here and now, and because its creation is endlessly fascinating, he finds beautiful ways to express one thing, often poetically, always compassionately. With a diamond in his hand, he wants to show us every facet.

Introduction The Hard Problem Of Consciousness

Our world culture is founded upon the assumption that reality consists of two essential ingredients: mind and matter. In this duality, matter is considered the primary element, giving rise to the prevailing materialistic paradigm in which it is believed that mind, or consciousness – the knowing element of mind – is derived from matter. How consciousness is supposedly derived from matter – a question known as the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ – remains a mystery, and is indeed one of the most vexing questions in science and philosophy today. Strangely, the fact that there is no evidence for this phenomenon is not deemed significant enough to dissuade most scientists and philosophers from their conviction that consciousness is a derivative of matter, although more and more are beginning to question it.

Some contemporary philosophers go further than believing consciousness to be an epiphenomenon, or secondary function, of the brain. In an extraordinary and convoluted act of reasoning they deny the very existence of consciousness, claiming it to be an illusion created by chemical activity in the brain. In doing so, they deny the primary and most substantial element of experience – consciousness itself – and assert the existence of a substance – matter – which has never been found. In fact, it is not possible to find this substance on the terms in which it is conceived, because our knowledge of matter, and indeed all knowledge and experience, is itself an appearance within consciousness, the very medium whose existence these philosophers deny. Such an argument is tantamount to believing that an email creates the screen upon which it appears or, even worse, that the email exists in its own right, independent of the screen, whose very existence is denied.

However, I hope that The Nature of Consciousness will show clearly that the materialist paradigm is a philosophy of despair and conflict and, as such, the root cause of the unhappiness felt by individuals and the hostilities between communities and nations. Far from being abstract and philosophical, its implications touch each one of us directly and intimately, for almost everything we think, feel and do is profoundly and, for the most part, subliminally influenced by the prevailing paradigm in which we have been raised and now live.

Most revolutions seek to modify the existing state of affairs to a greater or lesser degree but leave the fundamental paradigm upon which they are predicated intact. In The Nature of Consciousness another kind of revolution is suggested, one that strikes at the basic assumption upon which our knowledge of ourselves, others and the world is based.

It is the revolution to which Max Planck, developer of quantum theory, referred

when he said, ‘I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness.’†

It is the revolution to which Carl Jung referred when he said, ‘It is not only possible but fairly probable, even, that psyche and matter are two different aspects of one and the same thing.’§

Aldous Huxley referred to this as the ‘perennial philosophy’, that is, the philosophy that remains the same at all times, in all places, under all circumstances and for all people.

In the East, the Sanskrit term sanatana dharma refers to the same essential, eternal truths that transcend all culturally bound beliefs and customs. Sanatana dharma, the perennial philosophy, has been available since the dawn of humanity and has appeared in many different forms and cultures throughout the ages, each culture lending its own particular characteristics to it but never fundamentally changing its original understanding or its essential message for humanity.

The Nature of Consciousness is also, of course, subject to and a product of the conditioning of the culture and language in which it was written, although the essential understanding that is expressed in it transcends cultural and linguistic conditioning. However, it is my hope that its conditioned form will serve to clarify rather than mystify, obscure or dilute the essential understanding that lies at the heart of the perennial philosophy.

In this book it is suggested that consciousness is the fundamental, underlying reality of the apparent duality of mind and matter, and that the overlooking, forgetting or ignoring of this reality is the root cause of both the existential unhappiness that pervades and motivates most people’s lives and the wider conflicts that exist between communities and nations. Conversely, it is suggested that the recognition of the fundamental reality of consciousness is the prerequisite and a necessary and sufficient condition for an individual’s quest for lasting happiness and, at the same time, the foundation of world peace.

Chapter 1 The Nature Of Mind

All that is known, or could ever be known, is experience. Struggle as we may with the implications of this statement, we cannot legitimately deny it. Being all that could ever be known, experience itself must be the test of reality. If we do not take experience as the test of reality, belief will be the only alternative. Experience and belief – or ‘the way of truth and the way of opinion’, as Parmenides expressed it in the fifth century BCE – are the only two possibilities.

All that is known is experience, and all that is known of experience is mind.

Mind thus includes all thinking, imagining, remembering, feeling, sensing, seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling.

If all that could ever be known is experience, and all experience is known in the form of mind, then in order to know the nature or ultimate reality of anything that is known, it is first necessary to know the nature of mind. That is, the first imperative of any mind that wishes to know the nature of reality must be to investigate and know the reality of itself.

Whether mind perceives a world outside of itself, as is believed under the prevailing materialist paradigm, or projects the world within itself, as is believed in the consciousness-only approach suggested in this book, everything that is known or experienced is known or experienced through the medium of mind.

In fact, until the mind knows its own essential nature, it cannot be sure that anything it knows or experiences is absolutely true and not simply a reflection of its own limitations. Thus, the knowledge of the ultimate nature of mind through which all knowledge and experience are known must be the foundation of all true knowledge. Therefore, the ultimate question the mind can ask is, ‘What is the nature of mind?’

The common name that the mind gives to itself is ‘I’. Hence, we say, ‘I am reading’, ‘I am thinking’, ‘I am seeing’, and so on. For this reason, the question ‘What is the nature of mind?’ could be reformulated as, ‘Who or what am I?’ The answer to this question is the most profound knowledge that the mind can attain. It is the supreme intelligence. The question ‘What is the ultimate nature of the mind?’ or ‘Who or what am I?’ is a unique question in that it is the only question that does not investigate the objective content of the mind but rather the essential nature of mind itself.

But the nature of the mind itself never appears in, nor can it be accurately described in the terms of, objective knowledge, just as the screen never appears as an image in a movie.

The mind’s recognition of its own essential nature is a different kind of knowledge, a knowledge that is the ultimate quest of all the great religious, spiritual and philosophical traditions and that, although we may not realise it, lies at the heart of each person’s longing for peace, fulfilment and love.

Where to begin? As experience is all that could ever be known, we must start with experience, proceeding cautiously, like a scientist, trusting only our observation, doubting every belief and assertion, and only making statements that can be tested and verified by independent observers. If something is true for one person but not another, it cannot be absolutely true. If there is an absolute truth, it must be true for all people, at all times and under all circumstances.

In its search for the absolute truth, science rejects subjective experience on the grounds that it is personal and therefore cannot be validated by anyone other than the person having the experience.

So we could refine the ultimate question as, ‘Is there any element of subjective experience that is universal or shared by all?’ or ‘If the mind only ever knows its own contents, is there any element of the mind’s knowledge or experience that is common to all minds?’ That knowledge alone would qualify as absolute truth and, therefore, that knowledge alone would serve as the basis of a unified humanity.

Let us agree that there is experience and that experience must be the test of reality. Our experience consists of thoughts, images, memories, ideas, feelings, desires, intuitions, sensations, sights, sounds, tastes, textures, smells, and so on, and each of these is known. It is not possible to have a thought, feeling, sensation or perception without knowing it. What sort of experience would be one that is not known? It would not be an experience! Thus, we can say for certain that there is experience and that experience is known, even though we may not know exactly what experience is, nor who or what it is that knows it.

But with what is all objective experience known? A thought cannot know a sensation, a sensation cannot feel a perception, a perception cannot see a feeling, a feeling cannot know an image, and an image cannot experience a memory. Thoughts, sensations, perceptions, feelings, images and memories are known or experienced; they do not know or experience. Whatever it is that knows objective experience can never itself be known or experienced objectively. It can never be known or observed as an object. It is the knowing element in all knowledge, the experiencing in all experience. We could say that the mind consists of two elements: its known content and its knowing essence. However, these elements are not actually two separate, discrete entities, and later we will collapse this distinction.

The common name for the knowing or experiencing essence of mind is ‘I’. ‘I’ is the name we give to whatever it is that knows or is aware of all knowledge and experience. That is, ‘I’ is the name that the mind gives to itself in order to indicate its essential, knowing essence in the midst of all its changing knowledge and experience. I am that which knows or is aware of all experience, but I am not myself an experience. I am aware of thoughts but am not myself a thought; I am aware of feelings and sensations but am not myself a feeling or sensation; I am aware of perceptions but am not myself a perception. Whatever the content of experience, I know or am aware of it. Thus, knowing or being aware is the essential element in all knowledge, the common factor in all experience. ‘I’ refers to the knowing or aware element that remains present throughout all knowledge and experience, irrespective of the content of the known or experienced. Whatever it is that knows the thought ‘Two plus two equals four’ is the same knowing that knows the thought ‘Two plus two equals five’.

Whatever it is that knows the sound of birdsong is the same knowing that knows the sound of traffic. The two perceptions differ, and each comes and goes, but they are known alike by the same unchanging, subjective essence of all changing experience. The name ‘I’ denotes that knowing essence that is common to all knowledge and experience.

I am pure knowing, independent of the content of the known. I am the knowing with which all experience is known. I am the experience of being aware or awareness itself which knows and underlies all experience. Pure knowing, being aware or awareness itself is the essential ingredient of mind – the ever-present, subjective, knowing essence of mind, independent of its always-changing, objective content of thoughts, feelings, sensations and perceptions. Being aware or awareness itself is the knowing in all that is known, the experiencing in all experience.

Throughout the day the mind says, ‘I am thinking’, ‘I am hungry’, ‘I am cold’, ‘I am lonely’, ‘I am tired’, ‘I am travelling to work’, ‘I am forty-five years old’, and so on. As such, the mind consists of a continuous flow of changing thoughts, images, sensations and perceptions. However, there is one element of the mind – the feeling of being or the experience of being aware – that runs continuously throughout all changing experience. If, instead of being interested in the continuous flow of changing thoughts, images, sensations and perceptions, the mind becomes interested in its own essential nature, it will discover that the feeling of being or the experience of being aware is the common factor in all experience but does not share the particular qualities, characteristics or limitations of any particular experience.

In other words, as a first step towards realising the essential, irreducible nature of the mind, we separate out the permanent element of experience from its changing forms. We separate out the experience of being aware from what we are aware of.

All objective experience changes continually. Thoughts, feelings, sensations and perceptions are in a constant state of flux. A thought is by definition always flowing, a feeling always evolving, a sensation always pulsating and a perception always changing, albeit at times imperceptibly slowly.

However, each changing thought, feeling, sensation or perception is registered by the same knowing ‘I’, the common element in all experience. The knowing ‘I’ that is seeing or knowing these words is the same knowing ‘I’ that was knowing or aware of whatever ‘I’ was experiencing an hour ago, last week, last month, last year or ten years ago. That knowing ‘I’ – consciousness or awareness itself – is the common ingredient in all experience. It remains the same throughout all experience.

When we say ‘I’ today we refer to the same ‘I’ that we were two days ago, two months ago, two years ago or twenty years ago. What part of our experience of ourself accounts for the feeling of always being the same person? What is it in our experience of ourself that always remains the same?

The known or experienced always changes, but the knowing with which all changing experience is known always remains the same.

This knowing ‘I’ – the experience of simply being aware or awareness itself – is never itself either exuberant or sorrowful. Being the common element in both experiences, it is not qualified, conditioned or limited by either. In both experiences, indeed in all experience, it remains in the same pristine condition, without qualification or limitation.

Nothing ever happens to the knowing with which all experience is known. It is not enhanced or diminished by anything that it knows or experiences.

Therefore, the essential nature of mind does not appear or disappear; it has no beginning or end. It was not born and will not die.

We always feel essentially the same whole, indivisible, consistently present person, only we mistake the essential nature of that person.

The knowing with which all experience is known is to experience as a self-aware screen would be to a movie – that is, a magical screen that is watching the movie that is playing upon it. The movie is not separate from the screen, nor is it identical to it. Our changing thoughts, feelings, sensations and perceptions colour our essential being of pure knowing or awareness itself, but they do not modify, qualify, condition or limit it, nor are they identical to it. It is for this reason that the essential nature of mind is said to be pure knowing or pure awareness. ‘Pure’ in this context means unmixed with any of the qualities, conditions or limitations that it knows or is aware of, just as the screen is not inherently mixed with any of the limited forms that appear in a movie. The essential nature of mind – the experience of being aware, pure knowing or awareness itself – is inherently unconditioned and unlimited.

Likewise, just as a screen is never disturbed by the drama in a movie, so pure knowing, being aware or awareness itself is never disturbed by experience, and thus it is inherently imperturbable or peaceful. The peace that is inherent in us – indeed that is us – is not dependent on the content of experience, the circumstances, situations or conditions we find ourselves in. It is a peace that is prior to and at the same time

Whatever it is that knows, experiences or is aware of all experience is the most intimate, essential and irreducible nature of mind, ‘I’ or our self. Knowing or being aware is not a quality of our self; it is our essential self. Our self doesn’t have or possess awareness; it is awareness or consciousness itself. The suffix ‘-ness’ means the existence, state, presence or being of, so the words ‘awareness’ and ‘consciousness’ imply the presence of that which is aware or conscious.

The danger of using a noun to denote the experience of being aware or pure knowing is that we reify or objectify something – which is not a thing – that we have already discovered to be without objective quality.

Not only is pure knowing or awareness itself the primary element of mind; it is the only substance present in mind. It is easy to check this in experience. All that is or could ever be known is experience, and all there is to experience is the knowing of it – in fact, not the knowing ‘of it’, because we never encounter an ‘it’ independent of knowing. All there is to ‘it’ is the experience of knowing. In other words, we never know anything other than knowing.

In other words, we never know anything other than knowing. All there is to experience is knowing. There is no object that is known and no subject that knows it. There is just knowing.

Awareness is not simply the ultimate reality of experience; it is the only reality of experience. Experience is a freely assumed self-modulation of awareness itself, but whatever the content of the modulation, at no time does any substance other than awareness ever come into existence.

Any intellectually rigorous and honest model of experience must start with awareness, and indeed never stray from it. To start anywhere else is to start with an assumption. Our world culture is founded upon such an assumption: that matter precedes and gives rise to awareness. This is in direct contradiction to experience itself, from whose perspective awareness is the primary and indeed only ingredient in experience, and must therefore be the origin and context of any model of reality.

The terms ‘awareness’ and ‘consciousness’ are used synonymously throughout this book. † The word ‘mind’ is used here in the conventional sense, to indicate thoughts, images and feelings.

Being ‘conscious’ in this context is not meant in the conventional sense of being aware of an external object or a thought or feeling, but rather the simple experience of being aware, independent of objects.

Chapter 2 Only Awareness Is Aware

Our world culture is founded on the assumption that the Big Bang gave rise to matter, which in time evolved into the world, into which the body was born, inside which a brain appeared, out of which awareness at some late stage developed. None of this could ever be verified, because it is not possible to legitimately assert the existence of anything prior to awareness or consciousness. Therefore, any honest model of reality must start with awareness. To start anywhere else is to build a model on the shifting sands of belief.

However, it is not ‘I, the body’ that is aware; it is ‘I, awareness’ that is aware. A body doesn’t have awareness; awareness ‘has’ the experience of a body. The body, as it is actually experienced, is a series of sensations and perceptions in the finite mind, and the only substance present in mind is pure knowing or awareness.

Therefore, the experience of being aware, or the knowledge ‘I am’, ‘I am aware’ or ‘There is awareness’ is awareness’s knowledge of itself. Only awareness knows that there is awareness. Only awareness is aware. As such, awareness is self-aware. Just as all objects on earth are illuminated by the sun but the sun alone is self-luminous, so all experience is known by awareness, but awareness itself is self-knowing. Thus, it is awareness’s experience that it is continuously or, more accurately, eternally aware.

Awareness’s knowing of its being is also its ultimate or final knowledge, that is, the knowledge that remains over after every thought, feeling, sensation and perception has vanished, just as the screen remains over after a movie ends. It is to this understanding that Jesus refers in the Book of Revelation when he says, ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.’ It is also the knowledge to which the term Vedanta, meaning the ‘end of knowledge’, refers.

Because we normally believe that it is ‘I, the body’ that is aware or has awareness, the body and, by extension, the world are considered to precede awareness. Thus, awareness is considered to be derived from the body, as an epiphenomenon of the brain. However, in order to legitimately claim this, we would have to experience the body prior to the experience of being aware, and then notice the experience of being aware arising in the body. Nobody has ever had, or could ever have, this experience. If we maintain the honesty and rigor of the scientist, who is willing to state only the facts of experience without any regard for their implications or consequences, we must acknowledge that awareness is the primary element in all experience.

The essential nature of awareness is to be aware, just as it is the nature of the sun to shine. Simply by being itself, awareness is aware of itself, just as the sun illuminates itself simply by being itself.

Awareness vibrates within itself and assumes the form of the finite mind. The finite mind is therefore not an entity in its own right; it is the activity of awareness. There are no real objects, entities or selves, each with its own separate identity, appearing in awareness, just as there are no real characters in a movie. There is only awareness and its activity, just as there is only the screen and its modulation.

A child sometimes takes a mirror and catches the light of the sun with it, reflecting the sun’s light into a friend’s eyes. To believe that awareness needs a finite mind to know itself is like believing that the sun illuminates itself by reflecting its light off a little piece of mirror. The sun doesn’t need a mirror to illuminate itself; it illuminates itself by itself. Likewise, awareness doesn’t need to shine in or on an object, such as a mind or a body, to know itself through the reflected light of that object. The only substance that is present in awareness is being aware, aware being or pure knowing. Therefore, the knowing of itself is what it is, not what it does.

Just as the sun is too close to itself to turn round and illuminate itself in subject–object relationship, so awareness is too close to itself to stand apart from itself as a separate subject of experience and know itself as an object. Thus, awareness’s knowledge of its own being is utterly unique. It is a category of knowledge that transcends all other knowledge and experience. It is sacred knowledge. It is absolute. It remains the same at all times, in all places, and under all conditions and circumstances. It is the only certainty, from which all other knowledge borrows its relative certainty.

Awareness’s knowing of its own being is imperturbable, indestructible, inextinguishable, indivisible, immutable, immortal, invulnerable. It cannot be touched, but all knowledge and experience is touched by it. It is the only knowledge that does not require the division of experience into an apparent duality of subject and object, and so it is said to be non-dual knowledge.

The belief that awareness needs a mind in order to know itself is a common misunderstanding in the field known as Consciousness Studies, where the disciplines

For awareness, there is no distance between itself and the knowing of itself. It is simultaneously the subject and the object of its own experience.

The mind that seeks to know or find awareness is like a character in a movie that travels the world in search of the screen. It’s like a current in the ocean in search of water. The mind is made out of the very stuff for which it is in search, but it can never find that stuff on its own terms, that is, as an objective experience in time and space.

Mind is a self-colouring of awareness, just as a movie is a self-colouring of the screen.

We do not have awareness; we are awareness.

However, mind is not something separate from reality. It is reality itself – awareness itself – which assumes the forms of each of these minds and through their agency is able to know or perceive a segment of its own infinite potential in the form of the world. In other words, the illusion of a multiplicity and diversity of objects known by a separate subject remains; ignorance of its reality goes. As the eighth-century Zen master Huang Po said, ‘People neglect the reality of the illusory world.’

It will be recognised that the reality that underlies the appearance of multiplicity and diversity is itself an infinite, indivisible whole, and this understanding will inform all the subsequent activities of such a mind.

The science of consciousness is entirely between consciousness and itself. It is about awareness’s knowledge of its own being. Awareness’s knowledge of itself is the only absolute knowledge. It is sacred knowledge; in religious language it is God’s knowledge of Himself. It is the highest understanding, upon which all subsequent knowledge must depend.

Chapter 3 Panpsychism And The Consciousness-Only Model

If we start with the assumption of a universe and try to fit consciousness into that model, we end up with the classic panpsychist statement that all things have a degree of consciousness or, more simply, that the universe is conscious. However, from the perspective of consciousness there is no ‘all’. From consciousness’s perspective there is just its own seamless, indivisible, unified, infinite whole.

The belief that the universe is aware is simply an extension of the materialist belief that the body is aware. Fleas are not aware; fish are not aware; dogs are not aware; trees and rocks are not aware; human beings are not aware; the universe is not aware. Only awareness is aware! Only consciousness is conscious.

The universe is not conscious; consciousness is the universe!

The belief that consciousness is fundamental to the universe credits the universe with too much existence. The universe does not exist! That is, it does not ‘stand out from’ consciousness with its own independent reality. Only consciousness truly is. The apparent existence of the universe is consciousness itself – indivisible, self-aware being – refracted through the activity of the finite mind.

Matter is the way consciousness appears to itself when viewed through the prism of a finite mind. The finite mind always knows experience in duality, that is, in subject–object relationship, so the object must appear in a way that is distinct from the subject.

Consciousness is transparent, empty, non-objective, formless. Therefore, manifestation must seem to be solid, full, objective and with form. This is why the rocks and trees in our dreams seem to be solid.

The universe is consciousness itself: one seamless, indivisible, self-aware whole in which there are no parts, objects, entities or selves.

CHAPTER 4 THE INWARD-FACING PATH: THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN CONSCIOUSNESS AND OBJECTS

Although everyone is aware, few are aware of the awareness with which experience is known. That is, few are aware of being aware. To overlook the presence of awareness behind and within all experience is equivalent to overlooking the screen during a movie. Once the screen has been overlooked it is no longer possible to view the movie in the right context. Likewise, once awareness or the original nature of mind has been overlooked, it is no longer possible to know who or what anyone or anything truly is.

As a perspective, activity or process the ego is neither a mistake nor a problem. However, as an entity it is a problem, for the belief that our essential nature is limited to and located in the body is accompanied by the loss of the happiness, freedom and peace that are innate in the knowing of our own essential, irreducible being. That belief is the ultimate cause of the search for happiness through objective experience which defines and dominates the life of the separate self. The finite mind or ego is, therefore, much more than simply the conceptualisation of the ‘I’ thought.

Chapter 5 The Direct Path To Enlightenment

Three such individuals were Ramana Maharshi, Atmananda Krishna Menon and Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, who, in the middle of the twentieth century, between them resurrected the means by which the nature of awareness might be discovered by ordinary people without any prior knowledge or preparation and with no particular religious or spiritual affiliation.

‘What would that be?’ I asked rhetorically. ‘Consciousness! Consciousness is precisely that which is present and aware.’ I suggested that the experience of simply being aware that each one of us was having at that very moment is itself the experience of consciousness knowing itself.

The knowledge of our own being – the experience that shines in the mind as the knowledge ‘I am’ – is the same in all people.

Just as one person watching a movie will be so involved in the drama as to see only a multiplicity and diversity of separate and conflicting objects and selves, whilst another, watching the same movie, will see only a single, indivisible and inherently ‘peaceful’ screen, so the self-aware ‘screen’ of consciousness, upon which all experience plays, is equally available to all people in all circumstances, though it will appear differently according to the mind through which it is filtered and the form in which it seems to be modified or coloured.

However, the states of waking and dreaming are consciousness knowing itself in the form of the temporary, finite mind, and deep sleep is consciousness knowing its own eternal, infinite, unconditioned being. In other words, the ‘somethingness’ of the waking and dreaming states and the ‘nothingness’ of deep sleep are superimposed on consciousness by thought, making it seem that consciousness itself assumes the forms of three separate states.

The mind that believes that consciousness is limited is like water believing that its essential form is a wave; the mind that believes that consciousness is absent is like a wave believing that water is missing. Consciousness’s knowing of its own being is like water simply knowing itself as water, irrespective of its form as a wave. In fact, water knows nothing of waves; it knows only water. Likewise, consciousness knows only itself.       

However, the knowing with which the finite mind knows its limited knowledge is infinite consciousness, refracted through the lens of its own activity. So although everything that the mind knows is at best only relatively true, at the same time all knowledge is founded upon and made of the light of absolute truth. That is why William Blake said, ‘Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth.’ This light of pure knowing, which shines in the mind as the knowledge ‘I am’, and which is the ultimate foundation upon which all the mind’s relative and limited knowledge is based, is the ‘one exception’ by which the mind has access to reality.

This light of pure knowing, which shines in the mind as the knowledge ‘I am’, and which is the ultimate foundation upon which all the mind’s relative and limited knowledge is based, is the ‘one exception’ by which the mind has access to reality.

‘What can we know for certain that is absolutely true? Can anything that is known by the mind be relied upon?’ As the thought developed, I noticed that it was accompanied by a growing feeling of fear and dread in the body, a feeling that everything in which I had invested my identity and beliefs was subject to change and could not be reliable or certain. I felt that the solidity of the universe was dissolving around me. It was in response to the discomfort of this feeling that I turned away from the intuition and sought distraction and relief in objects and activities.

However, such a thought is like a minor earthquake, the effects of which are not always immediately discernible on the surface. Although I didn’t realise it at the time, this recognition was to be the first crack in what had been until then the unassailable edifice of Western materialist education.

However, although I could not see it at the time, the scientist’s search for knowledge is exactly the same search as an artist’s quest for beauty. In fact, the scientist’s search is not for knowledge itself but for understanding. Knowledge is thought, but understanding takes place when thought comes to an end, just as beauty is revealed at the end of a perception.

Thus, all the mind’s knowledge and experience appear in a form that is consistent with its own limitations, including its own belief in itself as an independently existing self or entity, just as the character in a dream, who in its own view of itself is an independently existing entity, is in fact simply the activity of the dreamer’s mind.

This veiling of peace, happiness or love is like a wound which resides in the heart of the apparently separate self, and which continuously tries to alleviate itself through the acquisition of objects, substances, activities, states of mind and relationships. However, at some point, either through intuition or at the suggestion of a friend, it becomes clear that this longing will never be fulfilled by objective experience. As a result, a new possibility opens up, in which it is recognised that in order to fulfil its longing for lasting peace and happiness the mind must be divested of its limitations.

Chapter 6 Self-Enquiry And Self-Remembering

For such a mind the presence of awareness may first be accessed as the experience of simply being aware, the feeling of being or the knowledge ‘I am’. Later on, the mind will recognise that all there is to experience is the knowing of it, and therefore the only substance that awareness ever truly knows or comes in contact with is itself.

However, a mind that has been indoctrinated with the materialist paradigm from an early age will believe that it experiences a multiplicity and diversity of objects, each with its own separate and independent existence, which it seems to know from the perspective of a separate subject or self, just as the dreamed world seems to be known from the perspective of a dreamed subject within that world.

In religious terms this resting of the mind in its source is referred to as the practice of the presence of God. The penultimate prayer is the directing of the mind exclusively towards God, but this prayer still leaves the mind intact as an entity separate from God. The ultimate prayer is the surrender of the very mind which considers itself to be an entity in its own right. To the mind that believes itself to be a limited entity in its own right, God is something other than itself. But if God is something other, then God must be finite, and such a God cannot be God. As the Sufi mystic Balyani said, ‘Otherness for Him is Him without otherness.’

In other words, God can only be known by Himself, and in order to know His own existence God must be self-aware. Therefore, God’s knowledge of Himself must be awareness’s knowledge of itself. Awareness’s knowledge of itself shines in each of our minds as the knowledge ‘I am’, the feeling of being or the simple experience of being aware. That is, the knowledge that each of us has of our very own being is God’s knowledge of Himself. Later we will also see that the ultimate reality – awareness’s knowledge of itself or God’s knowledge of Himself – shines in the experience of peace, happiness, love and beauty and, in fact, expresses itself in and as the totality of all experience.

Thus the knowledge ‘I am’ is God’s signature in the mind. It is the portal through which awareness localises itself as the mind and the same portal through which the mind passes in the opposite direction as it investigates its essential nature. The knowledge ‘I am’, or the knowledge of our own existence – awareness’s knowing of its own being – is our primary knowledge, upon which all other knowledge and experience depend. Until the nature of ourself is known, it is not possible to have correct knowledge about any other thing. Thus, there is no higher knowledge than to know the nature of oneself, the nature of ‘I’.

Unlike all other knowledge and experience that is known by ‘I’, the knowledge ‘I am’ is known by itself. It is I that knows that I am, or, as God said to Moses in the Old Testament, ‘I am that I am.’ The knowledge ‘I am’ is a trace in the mind of the vast ocean of awareness that lies beyond and prior to the mind, and indeed in which the mind appears.

This knowledge is known in religious terms as the Absolute or God’s infinite being. The knowledge ‘I am’ is the first form of God in the finite mind. ‘I am’ is thus said to be God’s holy name. God Himself has no name, but in the mind He shines as the name ‘I’ or ‘I am’.

This turning around of the mind is not an activity that the mind can undertake, but rather the cessation of an activity of which it was previously unaware. However, as a concession to the mind’s belief that this turning around is something it can do, the teaching may now elaborate a process in which the attention that the mind normally gives to objects that are conceived as other than itself is instead turned around and focused upon itself, the subject or knower.

The mind’s knowledge and experience are never separate from itself. The mind never knows anything at a distance from itself, just as the movie never takes place at a distance from the screen. The self-aware screen does not need to separate itself from the objects or characters in the movie to realise it doesn’t share their limitations or destiny. Indeed, it cannot separate itself from them, because they are only a modulation of its own being. All that is necessary is for the screen to simply ‘see’ that its essential nature is not inherently limited by the forms that it assumes.

What is described as the turning around of the mind upon itself is not so much a ‘turning around’ of the mind as a sinking, falling back or relaxing into itself. The phrase ‘turning around’ is used only in contrast and as a concession to the previous, object-facing direction of the mind. To a mind that is facing outwards to know objects, the non-dual teaching suggests turning itself around towards its source or essence in order to know itself.

But when, through interest in its own essential nature, the mind ceases to direct itself towards objective experience, it begins to sink or relax back into the source from which it has arisen. This source is pure knowing or awareness, before it knows or becomes mixed with any objective knowledge. This falling back of the attention into its source is the means by which the mind comes to know its original nature. In fact, this is not an activity of the mind, although it may seem as such to begin with, but rather the cessation of a previous activity – the activity of overlooking the knowing of its own objectless, self-aware being in favour of objective knowledge and experience.

Ramana Maharshi referred to it as the sinking of the mind into the heart of awareness. Nisargadatta Maharaj referred to it as focusing on the experience ‘I am’. The Russian philosopher P. D. Ouspensky referred to it as self-remembering. The poet Tennyson suggested seeking the ultimate nature of the mind as one would follow a ‘sinking star, beyond the utmost reach of human thought’. Referring to the same non-practice, St. Matthew tells us, ‘When thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.’ The Kashmir Shaivite mystic Lalla referred to this turning around of the mind when she said, ‘I have travelled a long way seeking God, but when I finally gave up and turned back, there He was, within me.’

At some point it occurs to King Lear that the peace he now feels has not been added to him as a result of anything that is or is not taking place in his life. The friendly stranger did not give it to him, nor can he take it away from him. It seems to come from within himself. He realises that the peace he now feels is, in fact, always present in the depths of his being. He recognises that his own inherently peaceful being is always available, lying just behind or underneath the turbulent flow of his thoughts and feelings, and is independent of the drama of his life and the conflicts in his relationships.

King Lear hears a voice inside himself say, ‘Turn towards me and I will take you into myself.’ He realises that it is his own deepest intelligence that is speaking to himself. He recalls the words of Isaiah in the Old Testament, ‘Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on Thee.’

This remembering of himself is not a memory of something that he once knew in the past and subsequently forgot, but

a memory of something that lies ever-present within him and that was simply obscured or ignored due to his fascination with and absorption in the life of King Lear. He looks around and realises that the friendly stranger has disappeared.

When John Smith recognises or remembers he is John Smith, he wakes up as if from a dream. But King Lear did not suddenly become John Smith when he woke up. King Lear was never King Lear. He was always only John Smith with a self-assumed limit. John Smith simply ceased imagining that he was King Lear. John Smith realises that he is always only John Smith but that his essential, irreducible being had become so mixed up with the thoughts and feelings of King Lear as to make it seem as if he had forgotten who he was. And with the forgetting or overlooking of his own being, its innate qualities of peace, fulfilment and love were eclipsed.

Chapter 7 The Experience Of Being Aware

Thought believes that awareness has limiting qualities, but those qualities are never actually found in experience. That is, in awareness’s own experience of itself, there are never any limitations or boundaries, just as, if space were able to look at itself, it would find no limit or boundary within itself.

The experience of being aware of being aware may be triggered by the thought ‘Am I aware?’ but it is revealed between this thought and the response ‘Yes’, that is, in between two appearances of mind. Just as the colourless screen is all that is present between two frames of a movie, so the experience of being aware or awareness itself is all that is present between two appearances of mind. However, just as the transparent screen – the background and reality of the movie – does not itself appear as an object in the movie, so the experience of being aware can never be experienced by or appear in the mind, even though it is the background and reality of the mind itself.

All experience is a play of mind, and mind – that is, thinking, feeling, sensing and perceiving – is a self-colouring of awareness, just as the movie is a colouring of the screen.

In fact, awareness is not just the background of the mind; it is all there is to mind. Mind is a temporary limitation of unlimited awareness, which is itself all that is ever truly present.

This is why Balyani said, ‘I knew my Lord through my Lord.’ To suggest that God’s infinite being is known by anything other than itself is the ultimate blasphemy. It is to posit a second entity, a self, apart from God’s infinite being, a finite consciousness apart from infinite consciousness. As Balyani said, ‘No one but He knows Him.’

The ‘I’ in each of us is the same ‘I’, modulating itself in and as all apparently separate minds but essentially the same indivisible, self-aware being.

Just as the space in all buildings is the same unlimited space, seemingly divided into a multiplicity and diversity of spaces of different shapes and sizes, so the knowing that shines in each of our minds is the same knowing, only seemingly divided into a multiplicity and diversity of minds by its reflection in numerous bodies. Once we have overlooked our unlimited being and, as result, believed and felt ourself to be a temporary, finite awareness, then love, the knowledge of our oneness with all beings, is veiled. It is for this reason that all apparently separate selves long, above all else, for love.

Love is the experience of that oneness of being. As such, love is God’s presence in the heart. That is why most people recognise that love is life’s consummate meaning and purpose.

To say that the mind seems to obscure or prevent the knowing of our own essential, irreducible being is not meant to suggest that mind is an entity in its own right that has an obscuring power. The mind is to awareness what an image is to a screen: simply a modulation of it. It is the screen itself that takes the shape of the image with which it seems to be veiled.

When awareness relaxes the focus of its attention from objects, it cannot and need not redirect its attention towards itself, for awareness itself is the source of attention.

Prior to any manifestation, awareness remains motionless and alone, knowing only its own eternal, infinite being.

However, that is only true from the point of view of the mind, which believes objects to be real things in their own right, made out of stuff called ‘matter’. From such a point of view awareness is empty, void, not-a-thing or nothing. From its own point of view – which is the only real point of view, and is itself not a ‘point’ of view – awareness is not nothing, nor is it something. ‘Nothing’ and ‘something’ both belong to mind, for both derive their meaning from the assumption of independently existing ‘things’.

We cannot even legitimately say that awareness ‘returns’ to its original condition, any more than we can say that the screen returns to its original condition when the movie ends.

In relation to the materialist belief that the body and world are made out of something solid, material and ‘full’, it is legitimate to say that awareness is not material, that it is ‘empty’ of the solid substance out of which objects are supposedly made. However, that statement starts with the idea of matter and works its way up to awareness, instead of starting with awareness and staying with awareness alone.

In reality, awareness is neither full nor empty. The idea that awareness is empty is a thorn that is used to remove another thorn: the idea that it is a by-product and shares the limits and destiny of matter. Awareness is beyond or prior to both fullness and emptiness, and cannot be conceptualised by the mind.

The mind that explores these matters is like a moth that seeks a flame. The moth is attracted by the light of the flame, just as the mind is attracted by the gravitational pull of its source and essence. However, as the moth approaches, the flame becomes hotter

and hotter and the moth begins to dance around it, at once attracted and repulsed by the heat, in which it intuits it will simultaneously die and discover its heart’s desire.

Chapter 8 The Essence Of Meditation

Mind is awareness in motion; awareness is mind at rest. In this relaxation, mind is gradually, in most cases, but occasionally suddenly, divested of its accumulated conditioning, leaving its essential nature of pure awareness exposed, simply knowing its own unlimited being. Awareness is the experience of simply being aware, or aware being. It is our essential, irreducible, indivisible nature.

It is not that thoughts, feelings, sensations and perceptions appear and disappear in awareness, like clouds in the sky. They are self-modulations of awareness, just as an image is a modulation of the screen but never exists or ‘stands out from’ the screen with its own independent and separate identity.

The character in the movie can never realise she is the screen, because it is her identity as a limited character that is itself the veiling of the screen. In order to recognise her identity as the screen, the very mind which she is directing towards the empty space must dissolve. In other words, she must cease being the separate character. In the same way, pure awareness never appears as an experience in or of the mind, although the feeling of being or the knowledge ‘I am’ is a hint in the mind of its presence. As the mind gives its attention to the feeling of being or the knowledge ‘I am’, its fixation on objective experience is relaxed and it begins to dissolve into its source and essence.

This is why Jiddu Krishnamurti referred to it as ‘the first and last freedom’. Awareness loses its last freedom as it passes through the portal ‘I am’ and assumes the form of the finite mind, and the finite mind gains its first freedom when it passes through the same portal in the opposite direction on its return to infinite awareness. Thus, in order to recognise its essential reality, mind must cease being mind. Mind cannot know awareness, even though it is made of it. Only awareness can know awareness.

As such, the question ‘Am I aware?’ or ‘Who am I?’ invites the mind – ‘like a sinking star’ – away from its customary objects of knowledge and experience – ‘the bounds of human thought’ – and draws it inwards towards its subjective source, the transparent, luminous, non-objective experience of being aware or pure awareness itself.

In reality, there is no such thing as ‘a mind’. What is normally considered the mind is a temporary, self-assumed limitation and localisation of the indivisible field of infinite awareness itself.

In almost all cases the mind does not dissolve in its source immediately; it is a gradual process in which mind directs itself towards the knowing with which it knows its knowledge and experience and, in doing so, sinks more and more deeply into the experience of simply being aware or awareness itself. As Rumi said, ‘Flow down and down and down, in ever-widening rings of being.’ As the mind flows down and down, sinking progressively deeper into its own essence – the experience of simply being aware or awareness itself – it is gradually divested of its colouring or conditioning and, in doing so, becomes increasingly transparent and luminous.

As the finite mind sinks into its infinite essence it gradually loses its colouring or conditioning, like an image fading on a screen, and as it does so it loses its limitations. In the non-process of meditation, the mind, as Rumi suggests, becomes progressively ‘wider’ until it is divested of all its limits and stands revealed as luminous, empty awareness itself, the original, naked, unborn, irreducible and essential condition of the mind, or, in religious language, God’s infinite being.

The more interested the mind becomes in its own essential nature of pure, objectless awareness, the more deeply it is drawn into it, and in time this interest grows into an intense love. Nothing could be more interesting or lovable than to know the nature of that through which all things are known.

The question ‘Am I aware?’ or ‘Who am I?’ initiates access to the highest intelligence of which the mind is capable. It is the ultimate thought. The mind can go no further than that; it is the farthest shore of knowledge. It is for this reason that Shantananda Saraswati, the former Shankaracharya of the north of India, said, ‘Real thinkers don’t think.’ That is, a mind which pursues absolute truth or a heart that longs for unconditional love will eventually bring itself to its own end.

Any knowledge that is not founded upon the mind’s recognition of its own essence of infinite, indivisible awareness will inevitably share the conditioning and thus the limitations of the finite mind with which it is known, and will therefore always be subject to change and doubt. As such, it will be, at best, only relatively true. Awareness’s knowing of its own eternal, infinite being is the only absolute knowledge, for it is the only knowledge that is not relative to and limited by the conditioning of the finite mind.

In such a culture each branch of knowledge would tailor the absolute truth to the various fields in which it operated, bringing to humanity its creative, healing intelligence and love.

CHAPTER 9 THE OUTWARD-FACING PATH: COLLAPSING THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN CONSCIOUSNESS AND OBJECTS

The spiritual path could be divided into three steps. The first step involves the investigation into the essential nature of the ego or separate self through the neti neti process, in which the witnessing subject of experience is extricated from all objective content and stands alone as pure consciousness, the primary and fundamental element of all experience.

In the second step, consciousness releases its attention from the objective content of experience, from which it separated itself in the first step, and begins to flow backwards or inwards into itself, eventually coming to rest in itself. It is in this self-resting or self-abiding that consciousness is gradually, in most cases, divested of its self-assumed limitations and recognises its own ever-present and unlimited being. This self-resting or self-abiding is the essence of meditation and prayer.

Once consciousness has recognised its own ever-present and unlimited nature – the recognition that is traditionally referred to as enlightenment or awakening – the purpose of distinguishing consciousness from objects has been accomplished and it is now necessary to dissolve this distinction. Thus, the third step on the spiritual path involves an exploration of objective experience in the light of our new understanding in order to collapse the apparent distinction between consciousness and its objects.

In this exploration, we discover that consciousness is not simply the witnessing presence to which all experience appears but the space or field in which all experience appears. Try to find an experience that takes place outside consciousness. All that is known of the apparently outside world is perception – sights, sounds, tastes, textures and smells – and all perception takes place in consciousness.

Thus, consciousness itself could be likened to an open, empty field or space-like presence in which all objective experience appears, like clouds appearing in an empty sky. Consciousness is not, in fact, a space; it is dimensionless.

Does a cloud ever have its own existence independent of the sky? Can a cloud be removed from the sky and still maintain its existence? Is not the temporary existence of the cloud borrowed from the permanent reality, relatively speaking, of the sky? Is it possible to have an experience that is independent of consciousness?

Even this metaphor suggests that there is something called ‘a movie’, albeit dependent for its existence upon the screen, but that is not true. We do not even find an object called a movie that is dependent on the screen, let alone independent of it! All there is to a so-called movie is the reality, relatively speaking, of the screen. The movie doesn’t exist or stand out from the screen. There is no such thing as ‘a movie’ as an object in its own right. All that is ever found is the screen, modulating itself in the form of the movie but never ceasing to be the screen and never becoming anything other than itself.

There is only consciousness. As the Vedantins say, ‘There is only the Self’, and as the Sufis say, ‘Everything is God’s face’.

It is for this reason that in the non-dual traditions in general, and in the Advaita Vedanta tradition in particular, the finite mind, separate self or ego is said to be an illusion. This does not mean that what is conventionally considered to be the finite mind is simply not there, as is believed in many contemporary, so-called non-dual teachings, but rather that what is there is not what it seems to be. An illusion always has a reality to it. A mirage in a desert is an illusion as water, but light, relatively speaking, is its reality. Likewise, the finite mind is an illusion as a separately existing entity, but infinite consciousness is its reality. The apparent ‘I’ of the separate self is the true and only ‘I’ of eternal, infinite consciousness.

It is the fruit of enlightenment, in which the peace, happiness, freedom and love that are inherent in consciousness’s knowing of its own infinite being gradually infiltrate, permeate and saturate all realms of objective experience, thereby progressively colonising and outshining it in the light of pure knowing.

In other words, consciousness is the only substance present in experience.

Some sages simply remain silent, preferring not to restrict absolute reality within the confines of the mind, whilst others use the mind as best they can to evoke this recognition, using such terms as infinite, immortal, impeccable, indestructible, imperturbable, irreducible, unconditioned, uncreated, unborn, undefiled, unharmable, unaffected and untouched. Although these seem to be adjectives that describe what consciousness or reality is, they are all, in fact, negative statements indicating what it is not.

Ramana Maharshi described the same stages of development: ‘The world is unreal; only consciousness is real; consciousness is the world’, that is, consciousness merged in experience; consciousness extricated from experience; experience merged in consciousness.

The same understanding expressed in the Upanishads as ‘I am That’ is, in the Christian tradition, ‘I and my Father are one’. That is, what I essentially am – pure consciousness – and what the ultimate reality of the universe really is, are one and the same. The ‘amness’ that all beings feel at the core of themselves and the ‘isness’ or existence that is shared by all objects are modulations of the same indivisible, self-aware being.

The great equation of the Vedantic tradition states simply, ‘sat (being) chit (consciousness) ananda (happiness)’, indicating that when the being or existence that is common to all objects is revealed to be identical to the consciousness with which all experience is known, the distinction or separation between people, animals and the world dissolves, and the experience of peace, happiness, love and beauty shines. There is only infinite, indivisible consciousness modulating itself in and as the totality of experience but never being, becoming or knowing anything other than itself and, therefore, free of any impulse to fulfil or protect itself. It is, as such, unconditional happiness itself. This recognition is said to be absolute because it is not derived from or dependent upon anything other than itself.

Chapter 10 Existence Is Identical To Awareness

In the words of Huang Po, ‘People neglect the reality of the illusory world.’

Every moment of experience, irrespective of its content, is infinite, indivisible, utterly intimate awareness, our very own self or being, appearing to itself, in itself, as itself. All objects are said to exist: a chair exists, a thought exists, an emotion exists. As such, existence is the common element, the shared essence, of all objects. However, existence is not a property of objects, just as the screen is not a property of a movie, nor water a property of a wave. Objects do not have existence. Existence – the isness of all seeming things – belongs to awareness alone, the only ‘one’ that truly

Existence is identical to awareness, for awareness obviously is – I am – and the isness of awareness must be the same as the isness of existence.

When St. Augustine was asked how one should behave in the world, he is said to have responded, ‘Love, and do whatever you want!’ If we understand and feel that every animal, person and object is our very own self, we cannot go wrong. That is the experience of love. It is the only moral guidance we need.

Awareness itself is an immense world of delight. It is peace and joy itself. It is awareness itself that assumes the activity of the five sense perceptions, thereby enclosing its own joyous immensity in form and appearing to itself as the world. The world is a materialisation of that joy.

The question ‘Why is there a world?’ should be reformulated in the light of this understanding as, ‘Why is there a finite mind?’ There isn’t! The finite mind is only a finite mind from the illusory perspective of a finite mind.

Why is there duality? There isn’t! What is the purpose of apparent duality? To make us realise that!

Each of our minds is like an opening through which infinite awareness knows itself in the form of the world.

To speak of an individual mind, let alone numerous minds, is a concession to thought. There are no separate, discrete minds. Separate minds are only such from the provisional and ultimately illusory point of view of an apparently separate mind. Each apparently separate mind is a vibrating field in and of the only mind there truly is: infinite, indivisible awareness. Each vibrating field is a borderless flux of loosely gathered energies that is in contact with all the other vibrating fields within the larger field of ‘infinite mind’ or awareness itself. However, as a concession to our desire to think about these matters, we may say that awareness vibrates within itself and appears to itself in the form of the world, which it knows from the perspective of each one of our minds.

Awareness is not the background or knower of experience, although it is legitimate to say so during the early stages of our exploration into the nature of reality. Awareness is all there is to experience, or rather, experience is awareness. There is just infinite awareness, being only itself, knowing only itself, and, because of the absolute non-existence of any distance, separation or otherness in its own experience of itself, loving only itself. When the Sufis say La ilaha illa la – ‘There is no God but God’ – they do not mean that their God, Allah, is the only true God as opposed to all the other religions’ Gods, as is commonly supposed. Rather, they mean that no mind, person, self, object or world ever actually comes into existence. No thing is a thing unto itself. No thing has its own being. The apparent existence of all objects and selves is borrowed from God’s infinite, self-aware being, infinite awareness, our very own intimate, impersonal self, from whose point of view there is nothing other than itself.

Chapter 11 The White Radiance Of Eternity

In Adonaïs: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote, ‘Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, stains the white radiance of eternity.’ The word ‘stains’ in this context means colours rather than blemishes, borrowing its imagery from stained glass windows. Just as a stained glass window colours the light passing through it, revealing the potential inherent in light itself, so experience or the finite mind refracts the light of pure knowing into the apparent multiplicity and diversity of objective experience, thus bringing part of its infinite potential into finite existence.

Having said that, awareness cannot really be said to have a point of view; a point of view is precisely what the separate self or finite mind is, that is, a location from which

objective experience seems to be known. In order to know objective experience, unlocated, dimensionless awareness must assume a location, place or ‘point’ from which it can view, know or perceive objective experience, and the body is that location.

Having abstracted a discrete object from the indivisible intimacy of pure knowing, thought has to name the substance out of which it is made. As such, matter could be defined as the material out of which everything outside awareness is supposedly made. The fact that nothing is or could ever be known outside awareness is not

deemed sufficient evidence to dissuade most people from believing that there is such a substance.

It is this luminous, empty knowing which freely assumes the ‘colours’ of experience by modulating itself in all forms of thought and perception, but no colour leaves a trace or residue on its essential nature. Life or experience itself doesn’t stain the white radiance of eternity.

Awareness cannot be harmed, moved, modified, aged, hurt, diminished, enhanced or destroyed by any experience. So we could rephrase Shelley’s line as, ‘Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, colours the white radiance of eternity’: life, in the form of a multiplicity and diversity of objective experience, colours the light of pure knowing.

Awareness is all there is to experience. It is this luminous, empty knowing which, vibrating within itself, shines in and as all experience. So it would be even more accurate to say, ‘Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, shines with the white radiance of eternity.’ This is what the Sufis mean when they say, ‘There is only God’s face.’

Chapter 12 The Focusing Of Consciousness

All vibration has a particular amplitude and frequency, and this vibration gives form to the otherwise formless field of pure consciousness. As eternal, infinite consciousness begins to vibrate within itself, thereby assuming a particular form, it ceases to know its own eternal and infinite being and instead appears to itself in finite form. It is similar to the way an empty, ‘unlimited’ screen appears as a finite image.

All experience is a movement of mind, and mind – that is, all thinking, imagining, feeling, sensing and perceiving – is a vibration of consciousness, appearing in consciousness, known by consciousness and made of consciousness.

The multiplicity and diversity of experience or mind is a modulation of the indivisible, undiversified field of pure consciousness, just as the multiplicity and diversity of the images in a movie are a modulation of the single, indivisible screen.

In other words, what is the relationship between infinite consciousness and the finite mind? The question is resolved by understanding that infinite consciousness and the finite mind are not two separately existing entities; the latter is a temporary modulation of the former.

Mind is the activity in and as which the inherently unified field of consciousness seems to divide itself in two – a subject that knows and an object, other or world that is known – just as in a dream our own mind seems to divide itself in two, one part becoming the dreamed world and the other the dreamed subject, from whose perspective it subsequently knows the world, although this apparent division of itself never actually compromises its unity.

The original, essential and irreducible nature of mind is infinite consciousness itself. This could also be called original mind or unconditioned mind. Thus, the mind is not separate from consciousness. In fact, there is no actual thing or entity called ‘mind’; there is only consciousness and its modulations.

In other words, creation or manifestation requires a sacrifice; it comes at a price. Consciousness must sacrifice itself, must ignore the knowing of its own infinite being, in order to bring manifestation out of itself into apparent existence.

There is just its own empty, formless, dimensionless presence, knowing its own eternal, infinite

Consciousness doesn’t pass through these states, just as a screen never passes through any of the experiences of a character in a movie. States unfold in consciousness, in the same way that the experiences of the character unfold on the screen.

Thus, consciousness never enters a state but simply vibrates within itself, unfolding itself within itself. The different states are different frequencies and amplitudes of its own activity.

Mind doesn’t begin or end, because when the movement of mind ceases the appearance of time ceases.

Consciousness brings manifestation into existence by freely limiting itself with its own creativity, thereby actualising a segment of its own infinite potential.

Of course, consciousness never sleeps; to ‘fall asleep to’ in this context means to ignore its own infinite reality.

In other words, consciousness enters its own imagination as a separate subject of experience, from whose point of view it knows the world, but in doing so it loses the knowledge of its own eternity and seems, as a result, to become temporary and finite. This is referred to as the Fall in the Christian tradition and ignorance – the ignoring of reality – in the Vedantic tradition.

It is for this reason that William Blake said, ‘Eternity is in love with the productions of time.’

In other words, the world can only be known in duality, in subject–object relationship. Consciousness has to divide itself in two – a subject that knows and an object that is known – in order to manifest creation.

Chapter 13 There Are No States Of Consciousness

Under the materialist paradigm which presently dominates our world culture, reality is believed to exist independently of mind, and therefore independently of consciousness, the essential nature of mind. From this perspective, matter is the material out of which reality is supposedly made. Mind, which is considered to be derived from matter, is thought to be a limited and distorted view of reality, depending on its state. Consciousness, if it is acknowledged at all, is considered a fleeting and ephemeral quality of mind. Thus, this paradigm starts with the assumption of matter and proceeds to build a model of reality upon it. However, no one ever has experienced, or could experience, matter in the absence of mind, and thus this assumption is founded upon an unverifiable belief.

As we fall asleep, the clarity and precision of the waking state begin to dissolve. Attention or mind starts to sink back into its source and is progressively relieved of its defining qualities and thus its limitations. That is why the laws of physics are looser

in the dream state than in the waking state, and why the boundaries and divisions between objects and selves are not so clearly defined.

There is only one ‘I’, the infinite, indivisible ‘I’ of pure consciousness or God’s infinite being, which refracts itself through the activity of its own creativity and appears to itself, in itself, as itself, in the form of an apparent multiplicity and diversity of objects, selves and others. The world is what God’s infinite being looks like when viewed from the perspective of an apparently separate subject.

When a camera is fully unfocused nothing is seen through it, but as the lens is progressively focused, objects begin to emerge from the unmodulated image, bringing into view what was already present but could not be seen.

Likewise, everything exists eternally in infinite consciousness, in a way that is impossible for the mind to understand. It is the gradual focusing of consciousness – the activity known as mind – that brings the previously unfocused and therefore inaccessible content of consciousness into apparent existence.

These feeling of peace, joy and connectedness are not in fact new feelings. They are simply the inherent qualities of our essential nature filtering into objective experience through the previously murky layers of contraction and separation. It is for this reason that we are never motivated to move away from such feelings. They feel like

home. They feel like our birthright. They are our birthright! The recognition of our true nature – its recognition of itself – will always decrease our suffering, although the extent to which and the speed at which this happens will be dictated in most cases by the density of our previous conditioning. The body, being a denser vibration of mind than are our thoughts and feelings, usually takes longer to be permeated by the peace of our true nature, but in time even the body begins to be colonised by the light of consciousness, leading to a profound relaxation and an increase in sensitivity and openness. When a well-known Zen master was asked by one of his students, whilst lying on his deathbed, ‘How is it for you now, Master?’ he replied, ‘Everything is fine, but my body is having a hard time keeping up!’

The deeper layers of the separate self are laid down as a network of feelings and sensations that permeate the body, imbuing it with a feeling of heaviness, opacity, insensitivity, dullness, depression and, above all, separation from others and the environment. In most cases these feelings of heaviness and separation survive the recognition of our true nature, and a further process is required to expose and dissolve them. Such feelings are immune to rational analysis, and therefore the written word is not the ideal medium for their exploration.

As meditation deepens, the inherent transparency and sensitivity of consciousness is no longer dulled or obscured by its own activity. People and objects become transparent to the light of consciousness, no longer veiling consciousness but shining with it, announcing its presence and delivering something of its beauty, which is beyond the mind’s capacity to know or grasp.

I refer anyone who would like to make a deeper exploration of these residues of separation that remain hidden in the body to my collection of meditations, Transparent Body, Luminous World – The Tantric Yoga of Sensation and Perception, published by Sahaja Publications.

Chapter 14 Wordsworth And The Longing For God

This apparently limited self or ego is the ‘Soul’ to which Wordsworth refers. It is the beacon of consciousness around whom the finite mind revolves, that shines – ‘our life’s Star’ – as ‘I’ in the midst of all experience. However, this ‘I’ does not belong to, nor does it share the limits or destiny of, the finite mind. The finite mind borrows the knowing with which it knows its experience from infinite consciousness, the only consciousness there is. The soul or separate self ‘hath had elsewhere its setting and cometh from afar’. It ‘comes from’ infinite consciousness. It is a contraction within eternal, infinite consciousness or, in religious language, God’s infinite being. The soul or separate self is a crystallisation of the infinite field of pure consciousness, a dream in God’s mind, from which it derives its being and its sense of ‘I’-ness.

To know itself, consciousness does not need to rise in or assume the form of mind. It knows itself by itself, in itself, as itself.

Maya, as illusion, is the activity of mind through which infinite consciousness brings manifestation out of its own being into apparent existence. It is its own cause. However, from the point of view of consciousness, its ability to assume innumerable names and forms does not create the illusion of a world, but is rather seen and experienced as an ever-changing outpouring of itself within itself in order to realise, manifest and enjoy the endless flow of its own infinite potential in form.

In order to manifest itself as a world, consciousness contracts within itself, sacrificing the knowing of its own infinite being for the sake of love, and in doing so seems to cut itself off from its own innate peace and happiness. For this reason there is a wound in the heart of all apparently separate selves, which most seek to alleviate by losing themselves in objective experience. In order for consciousness to reclaim its innate happiness, a reversal of this process takes place, and it is for this reason that in the Tantric tradition it is said that the path by which we fall is the path by which we rise. The experience of happiness is the relaxation of this process, the unwinding of the self-contraction. This reversal is the de-localisation of awareness in which the mind is gradually, in most cases, divested of its temporary limitations and returns to its original, unconditioned, irreducible essence of pure consciousness, which shines as happiness itself. In fact, the mind doesn’t return to its original condition; it never left there. There is nowhere for the mind to reside other than its own nature of unlimited consciousness. It would be more accurate to say that consciousness ceases to veil itself with its own creativity, and is revealed to itself as it is. It recognises itself. The knowing of its own ever-present, unlimited being is the experience of happiness itself, and it is for this reason that all apparently separate selves seek happiness above all

This dissolution also takes place momentarily on the fulfilment of a desire, when the mind’s activity of seeking comes briefly to an end and, as a result, the mind plunges into its source and briefly tastes the unconditional peace and inherent fulfilment of its true nature.

Although these brief moments give the mind samples of the lasting peace and happiness it desires, they never fully satisfy it. At some point it begins to dawn on the mind that it is seeking peace and happiness in the wrong place. This intuition may occur spontaneously as a result of repeatedly failing to secure happiness in objective experience, or as a result of a moment of despair or hopelessness when the mind, having exhausted the possibilities of finding fulfilment in objective experience, finds itself at a loss and, with no known direction in which to turn, stands open, silent and available. In this availability the mind is receptive to the…

The unwinding of the mind may also be effected in more extreme moments of great fear, sorrow or loss, when the coherence of the mind is temporarily disturbed and it is ‘thrown back’ into its original condition, a fact that the Tantric traditions have developed into a series of formal practices in which the mind surfs intense emotion back to the shore of awareness. It can also be brought about in moments of heightened pleasure, such as sexual intimacy, when the mind is expanded beyond its customary confines by the intensity of the experience and, as a result, tastes the nectar of its own immortality. In fact, from this perspective the experience of pleasure, normally the enemy of spiritual realisation in the religious traditions, is considered a taste of pure consciousness. In the moment of aesthetic…

It is the experience that the artist seeks to evoke, and to which Paul Cézanne referred when he said that he wanted his art to give…

Manifestation is simultaneously consciousness’s sacrifice of itself and its celebration of itself. The same process of self-sacrifice and celebration is performed in the microcosm of an artist’s studio, where the artist has to surrender herself entirely in order to bring forth what is within her. Every artist will recognise this process in the words of the Sufi mystic and poet Hafiz: ‘I was a hidden treasure and I longed to be known.’ This longing lives in the hearts of all people and initiates the process of creation that has taken place in caves, studios, theatres and concert halls since the dawn of humanity.

Chapter 15 The Shared Medium Of Mind

From the perspective of consciousness itself, which is the only true perspective, it is always in the same condition, accessing a spectrum of its infinite possibilities in the form of various states but never entering any state itself, just as a screen is always in the same condition irrespective of the programmes that are playing on it. Because the laws of physics are looser in the dream state than they are in the waking state, corresponding to the degree of relative relaxation of consciousness, events that would be considered magical from the point of view of the waking state are quite possible in our dreams. For instance, in a dream consciousness can localise itself in and as a body on the streets of New York one moment and be in Paris, in and as another body, the next.

Telepathy, synchronicity and intuition are all examples of the normal boundaries of the waking state becoming relaxed and the boundaries between finite minds becoming correspondingly looser. Such experiences are embarrassing inconveniences under the materialist paradigm, but they occur too frequently to be dismissed.

From the point of view of the consciousness-only paradigm, in which all experience is understood as a contraction and relaxation of consciousness in the form of the finite mind, there is nothing extraordinary about such occurrences. Indeed, they are to be expected. In this model it is no stranger for there to be communication between minds at a distance than it is for objects to be connected in physical space. The physical space that apparently connects objects is a pale reflection at the level of the finite mind of the true medium in which all experience appears and through which it is connected: consciousness alone.

Finite minds are localisations within a single field of infinite consciousness, with no distinct boundaries between them, or between states within any one mind.

The body is an appearance of mind, which is itself a modulation, colouring or conditioning of infinite consciousness, so the death of the body entails the dissolution or unravelling of a particular configuration of mind. However, there is nothing to suggest that the underlying forms and energies of mind, which previously condensed to appear as the body, may not remain in a looser configuration when the body disappears. The disintegration of a whirlpool leaves a residue of ripples in the river in which it was localised long after the whirlpool has lost its specific form, and this residue may form the basis on which a new whirlpool coalesces downstream. In the same way, the forms or energies of mind that coalesced to form the appearance of a body in one lifetime may remain present in consciousness after the body has disappeared, and there is nothing to suggest that these residues may not coalesce ‘downstream’ and appear in the form of a new body, and thus in another life.

The waking state is only a narrow segment of the activity of mind, through and as which consciousness brings a segment of its infinite potential into apparent existence. As consciousness relaxes, its field of focus widens and, as a result, it has access to a broader segment of its own infinite field of possibilities. Whether we call this broader field of mind the collective or personal unconscious, altered states, drug-induced states, out-of-body experiences or near-death experiences, there is obviously much more to mind than is ordinarily accessible during the waking and dream states.

Everything there is exists in and as a modulation of consciousness, although not everything there is always appears in the narrow focus of the waking-state mind. Even now, if I were to draw your attention to the tingling sensation at the soles of your feet, you would suddenly seem to become aware of that sensation.

The tingling sensation was in consciousness all along, but not in the narrow field of the waking-state mind until it was pointed out, at which point attention shifted to the sensation, thereby illuminating it. The experience was always present but previously unknown, just as a torch in a dark room illuminates objects that are already present but were previously unseen. In this way, the focusing of attention brings a segment of the total field of consciousness into view at any one time by excluding all other possibilities. Consciousness rises in the form of attention precisely for the purpose of collapsing its field of infinite possibilities into a single actuality.

This mechanism accounts for the phenomenon of memory under the consciousness-only model. Consider the situation when somebody’s name is on the tip of your tongue. ‘On the tip of my tongue’ means ‘I know it but I don’t know it in this moment’. In that moment, where is the friend’s name? If we know it, it must be in consciousness, the only ‘place’ where any knowledge or experience can reside. The reason we feel that we don’t know it is that at that moment the waking-state mind has no access to that information. It is in consciousness but outside the limited compass of the waking-state mind. Moreover, the harder we try to think of our friend’s name, that is, the more we focus on it, the more it eludes us, until we intuit that to remember the name we must relax the focus of attention rather than concentrate it. We feel that the name is there but we don’t have access to it, and our intuition is correct. The name is there, just outside that small part of the field of consciousness that has been brought into focus in the form of the waking-state mind.

The name Sophie doesn’t appear from somewhere outside consciousness. It is always in consciousness, the only place it is possible for anything to be. Nor does it move from one segment of consciousness – the unconscious – to another – the waking-state mind. The name always stays in the same place, the only place it is possible to be, the placeless place of consciousness. As the mind relaxes its self-contraction it encompasses more of the field of infinite consciousness, in the way that an inflating balloon has increasing access to the space into which it is expanding. As a result, what previously seemed to be outside mind is now experienced inside it.

Thus, time is not validated by memory; memory, in the form of thought, creates the illusion of time. It is the activity of consciousness, in the form of the apparent expansion and contraction of mind, that makes what is eternally present now appear as a succession of events in time.

Carl Jung called this shared field of mind the ‘collective unconscious’, which is a somewhat misleading term in that it implies that the contents of this field lie outside consciousness, which is not the case. It is, rather, the collective field of consciousness which lies, for the most part, outside the compass of the waking-state mind and makes itself known to the individual mind through dreams, images, intuitions, and so on.

Each finite mind brings a segment of infinite consciousness, ‘airy nothing’, into actualisation, thereby giving its otherwise unknowable, formless reality a local name and form. The function of an artist is to bring into the field of the waking-state mind knowledge that comes from the broader medium of mind in which it is precipitated but to which, under normal circumstances, it has no immediate access. The result is a work of art that inspires humanity to a life of love, beauty and understanding. As such, the artist is a function, not a person. It is the function within humanity that serves to restore the balance where separation, despair, conflict and hostility have eclipsed the light of love and understanding that lives in each of our hearts. Art is remembrance.

This apparent merging of the field of the perceiver with the field of the perceived is the experience known as beauty.

A person is not an object made of matter; a person is an activity of mind, a field of experiencing. A person, in the conventional sense of the word, is how that activity appears from the perspective of another finite mind, how the object looks from the perspective of a subject.

In the New Testament, the same understanding is expressed by St. Matthew, ‘For when two or three are gathered in My name, there am I in the midst of them.’ In this gathering, the shared essence of each of our minds is magnified and shines as the experience of love. At the level of the waking state, our bodies and minds appear to be separate, as do the characters in a movie. But just as characters in a movie are modulations of the same indivisible screen, so our waking-state minds and the bodies that appear in them are energetic emanations from the same indivisible field of mind whose nature is infinite consciousness.

A question that is commonly asked after encountering this approach is, ‘If everything appears in the same consciousness, and I am essentially that consciousness, why am I not aware of everybody else’s thoughts and feelings?’

All there is to the finite mind is consciousness, but there is much more to consciousness than the finite mind. This is often misunderstood in contemporary expressions of non-duality, which mistake the non-dual understanding for solipsism. Solipsism is the belief that only the content of ‘my’ finite mind exists; it is a form of insanity. In the non-dual perspective it is understood that only consciousness is, and that everything appears in, is known by and is ultimately made of that very consciousness.

just the same way, each of our finite minds is capable of a multiplicity and diversity of thoughts and perceptions without compromising its single, indivisible status.

Instead of imagining objects and people made out of matter that supposedly exist outside the field of consciousness, know and feel that all that is experienced is a vibrating field of mind, which is itself a modulation of pure knowing or consciousness itself. This vibrating field of mind appears in the form of objects and people on the outside, and thoughts, feelings and images on the inside, including the appearance of our own body.

The reason we all seem to share the same world is not that there is one world ‘out there’ known by innumerable separate minds, but rather that each of our minds is precipitated within, informed by and a modulation of the same infinite consciousness. There is indeed one world that each of us shares, but that world is not made of matter; it is a vibration of mind, and all there is to mind is infinite, indivisible consciousness.

It is the sameness of consciousness, which shines in and as each of our minds, that is responsible for the conviction that we all share the same world. In the same way, all the characters in a night dream feel that they share the same world because they are all created by the same dreaming mind. The sameness of the world is the sameness of consciousness. Our shared world is our shared consciousness. The vastness of the universe is the vastness of consciousness.

The materialist perspective is not grounded in experience. It requires an abstract line of reasoning that presupposes the existence of a reality outside consciousness, although nobody has ever experienced this, nor could they ever experience it. The materialist point of view asserts the reality of that which is never experienced – matter – and denies that which alone is always experienced – consciousness itself. That is the tragedy and the absurdity of the materialist perspective from which humanity is suffering.

The second point of view – which is not just the spiritual but also the truly scientific point of view – is in line with our experience and so should trump the materialist perspective, which turns out to be nothing more than a belief and, as such, simply a popular religion. For this reason, the materialist perspective should be sliced out of our contemporary worldview with Occam’s razor and the laws of physics, as a result, should be upgraded to laws that govern the unfolding of mind rather than the behaviour of matter.

The science of consciousness is consciousness’s knowledge of itself. Consciousness’s knowledge of itself – which is the only knowledge that remains the same at all times, in all circumstances and under all conditions and is, therefore, absolute knowledge or truth – must be the foundation and fountain of all relative knowledge. A culture that is based upon any other understanding is bound in the end to destroy itself, for the ignorance at its heart – the ignoring of reality – will sooner or later rise up and turn people against themselves, their planet and one another.

Chapter 16 The Memory Of Our Eternity

We normally believe that experience takes place in time, and ‘now’ is the name that we give to the moment in time at which experience occurs. Time is, as such, considered to be a line extending indefinitely into a past and a future, and the now is considered to be a point that is slowly moving along that line.

we go back even further, we believe that there was a moment in the distant past at which we were born, and that we are progressing along this everlasting line of time towards a moment in the future when we will disappear or die. Let us subject this model to the scrutiny of experience, because almost everything we think and feel, and subsequently almost all our activities and relationships, are predicated upon this model of time. Let us first think of an event that happened in the past. Although that thought is a thought of the past, nevertheless it takes place now, in the present. So instead of thinking about the past, try now to actually experience it. In order to do so we have to take a step out of the now and actually visit the place called ‘the past’. Try to actually go to the time at which breakfast yesterday took place, not the thought or the image of it – these both take place now – but the actual experience of it. Now think of a time in the future when breakfast tomorrow will take place. The thought takes place now, but try to actually experience that time. In order to do so we have to leave the now and visit this place in the future. See, in this way, not just

philosophically but experientially, that these two times, the past and the future, are never actually experienced. They are concepts that, although essential for practical purposes, don’t bear any relation to actual experience.

Go to the experience of now. How long does the experience of now last? Even to ask the question as to how long the now lasts is to assume time, which can never be found in experience.

How many ‘nows’ have you ever experienced? For instance, how many nows have there been today? Are there numerous nows, or is it ‘always’ the same now? Did now come from a distant past, and is it progressing towards a distant future? If so, at what speed is it moving? If we have no actual experience of a past or a future, what legitimacy is there to the belief that now is a moment that moves from the past to the future? A moment has duration, and something that has duration lasts in time. But there is no time present in which now can last. Now is not a moment in time. This now is the only now there is, and it is not going anywhere. See that it is always now. However, what does the word ‘always’ mean? It means lasting forever in time. To say that now is always present means that the now lasts forever, throughout the past and the future, but we never actually experience a past or a future. There is no such thing as a ‘present moment’, because there is no time present for the now to be a moment within. If we agree that experience must be the test of reality, we cannot legitimately say that it is always now, for there is no time in which now can last. It is not always now; it is eternally now. Eternal does not mean everlasting in time. It means without beginning or end and, therefore, not in time at all. Indeed, there is no time present in which now could be or last. The eternal now is not an extraordinary, esoteric or metaphysical dimension that none of us have access to under normal circumstances. It is the very now at which all experience takes place – not the everlasting now, but this, the ordinary, only, ever-present now. Time is not the container of now. Now is the container of experience, including all thoughts of time, but never the actual experience of time. Now is eternity.

Now is ‘I am’. Whenever it is now, I am; whenever I am, it is now. Now is consciousness. Thought cannot know consciousness, although it is made of it, and as a result it superimposes its own limitation on consciousness and conceives it as time. Thus, time is what eternity looks like when refracted through the limitation of thought.

In deep sleep there is no finite mind – that is, no activity of thinking and perceiving – and therefore no experience of time or space. In deep sleep there is only the self-aware presence of consciousness simultaneously being and knowing its own inherently peaceful, unconditionally fulfilled being. This dimensionless field vibrates within itself and assumes the form of mind, that is, takes the shape of the dreaming and waking states. As such, it colours itself with its own activity, thereby giving its own dimensionless presence the appearance of dimensions, that is, the appearance of time and space.

Just as a movie and a documentary appear on a screen, giving the two-dimensional screen the appearance of three dimensions, but never actually displace or modify the screen itself, so the states of dreaming and waking emerge ‘within’ the ever-present, dimensionless field of pure consciousness but never displace or modify it. In fact, the deep sleep state is only considered to be a limited state from the point of view of either the waking or dreaming state. Believing that time and space are attributes of an objective reality that exists independently of mind, thought imagines that in deep sleep time and space (and all the events and objects they contain) continue, and that mind and its essence – consciousness – disappear. This belief is an inevitable corollary to the belief that the body is made of matter and that mind is derived from it. From the perspective of the consciousness-only model, it is consciousness itself that assumes the form of mind, that is, thought and perception, each mode projecting its own limitations on consciousness and making it appear to itself as time and space.

The time experienced is not in the book; it is in mind. It is mind!

As such, time and space are the two subtlest and most transparent objects. They mimic the form of consciousness in the finite mind by sharing its transparent qualities.

Eternity gives birth to time within itself; infinity unfolds space within itself. However, at no point does consciousness ever cease being dimensionless consciousness. From consciousness’s pointless point of view it is eternal and infinite.

All experience is believed to take place in space, thus space is considered to be the medium in which mind is located. ‘Here’ is considered the particular point in space from which the rest of space and its contents are known or viewed. Everything that is not ‘here’ is considered to be ‘there’. But do we ever actually experience the place called ‘there’? The experience of ‘there’ takes place here, just as the experience of the past or future takes place now. It is not possible to leave ‘here’ and visit ‘there’. ‘There’ is always a concept, never an experience. Space is the distance between the point ‘here’ and the point ‘there’, or between two points ‘there’. However, only here is experienced. How much distance can there be between that which is experienced and that which is not experienced? See in this way that space itself is a concept and never an experience.

The word ‘infinite’ does not mean extended indefinitely in all directions. Infinite means ‘not finite’, that is, with no finite qualities. It means without dimensions, that is, not in space, just as eternal means not in time. The infinite is not an extraordinary, mystical realm to which none of us have access. The infinite is the placeless place, dimensionless consciousness, at which all experience takes place; we are ‘always’ experiencing it. The infinite refracted through the prism of perception appears as space, just as eternity refracted through the prism of thought appears as time. It is the limitations of our own minds that make eternal, infinite awareness appear as time and space.

We normally believe and feel that we pass through three states of waking, dreaming and sleeping each period of twenty-four hours. The only reason we believe and feel that we pass through these states is that we have forgotten, overlooked or ignored our essential nature of eternal, infinite awareness. Eternal, infinite awareness never passes through any state; all states pass through it.

A movie doesn’t pass through the screen; it is the screen. All there is to a movie is the screen. The movie is a self-modulation of the screen.

Imagine two teenage boys sitting on the sofa watching television. Their mother comes in and asks the first son, ‘What are you watching?’ He says, ‘Breaking Bad!’ An hour later she comes in and asks the first son, ‘What are you watching?’ This time he says, ‘The Simpsons!’ An hour later she comes in. The show is over and the TV is turned off, and the mother asks the first son, ‘What are you watching?’ He says, ‘Nothing!’ The mother also asks the second son the same series of questions. She comes in during Breaking Bad and says, ‘What are you watching?’ He says, ‘I see the screen!’ An hour later she comes in again: ‘What are you watching?’ ‘I see the screen!’ She comes in an hour later and the TV has been turned off: ‘What are you watching?’ ‘I see the screen!’ The first boy thinks that he is seeing a multiplicity and diversity of objects during Breaking Bad and The Simpsons, and therefore when the programmes end he thinks he is seeing a third state of the screen: nothing. The ‘nothing’ that he thinks he sees at the end of the two programmes is only in relation to the apparent multiplicity and diversity of things that he thought he was seeing during them. The second son doesn’t superimpose something onto the screen during the two programmes, and therefore doesn’t feel that he is seeing nothing when the TV is turned off. He sees the same screen throughout.

We never go anywhere. We do not pass through experiences; experiences are a self-colouring of the eternal, infinite presence of awareness. This presence of awareness is never stained or harmed or moved by experience. It is always in the same pristine, luminous condition.

Awareness does not fall asleep at night. Awareness knows nothing of sleep; it is always wide awake. In sleep, or indeed in any other state, awareness does not enter a new state. Awareness never passes through any state. What thought considers to be sleep is simply the removal of thoughts, feelings, sensations and perceptions from the ever-present, wide-awake, inherently peaceful, unconditionally fulfilled background of awareness.

Awareness, the reality of all experience, is always in the same indivisible, indestructible, luminous condition. Understand and feel that nothing ever happens to you. You are still in the same pristine condition that you were in on the day you were born, and the day before your birth, because you, awareness, were never born. You are in the same pristine condition now that you will be in on the day after you die, because you, awareness, never die. With this understanding, we no longer feel we have to defend ourself against any experience or retreat from life in any way. We are safe wherever we go. We are untouched by experience, and yet we touch all experience intimately.

We are not moving through time and space. Time and space are, as it were, moving through us.

One of the reasons we love to travel is that that element of ourself which never goes anywhere is, by contrast with the movement involved in travelling, brought into focus. The changes emphasise the changeless. The sense of deep peace that often accompanies a journey is the peace of our changeless presence. We love to go to different

places only to taste again and again the recognition that we never go anywhere and to feel the peace that accompanies that recognition.

The screen never takes the journey that the character in the movie undertakes, although all there is to the journey is the screen. All there is to the appearance of space and time is infinite, eternal consciousness, but eternal, infinite consciousness never appears in space and time. Here and now is the intersection of infinite, eternal consciousness with the finite mind.

As Balyani said, ‘He is now as He was then.’ Our essential, self-aware being is always in the same pristine condition. At some point this intuition becomes our lived and felt experience, and it brings with it a release from the fear of death and the sense of lack that characterise the separate self or finite mind. Thus it brings with it the peace and fulfilment that are inherent in the knowing of our own being as it is, its knowing of itself in us, as us. What I essentially am is eternally present. I didn’t come from somewhere. I am not going anywhere. Nothing is ever added to me, nor removed from me. No experience ever aggrandises or diminishes me. I am complete, fulfilled, whole, perfect. What I essentially am is always in the same pristine condition. I have never been harmed, stained or aged by experience. I was not born and do not die.

The well of peace that rises from this understanding is the peace that passeth understanding. It does not come from the mind. It comes from the background of the mind but progressively floods the mind with its presence, gradually turning the mind into itself.

So take all of your drawings and put them one on top of the other, creating a pile of drawings, each one on a transparent page, representing each day – or, we could say, each moment – of your life. Every experience takes place in the same now, and so the drawings are not laid out in sequence but rather stacked one on top of the other in parallel, as in a book. It is true that, due to the limitations of mind, in order to access the story of our lives that is simultaneously present in the eternal now, we have to read one page at a time. Thus it seems from the perspective of mind that the events of our lives take place in time. In fact, it is the mind that unfolds the eternal now and makes it appear as time.

The conventional interpretation of reincarnation makes the mistake of assuming the existence of time, and yet this assumption is based on a valid intuition. We do not reincarnate in time, and yet each of our minds, and all the minds of those who have lived before us, is born from a single mind, of which it is an extension. We are literally each other. Each of us is the outer face, or the objectification, of the only mind there is, eternal, infinite consciousness. We are all mirrors of the same consciousness.

Chapter 17 Consciousness’S Dream

Imagine a woman named Mary who lives in New York. One night Mary falls asleep and dreams that she is Jane walking the streets of London. In this analogy Mary’s mind stands for consciousness. Relatively speaking, Mary’s mind is infinite, that is, all possible dreams lie in potential within it. She could dream she is Sophie in Amsterdam, Katie in Munich or Chloe in Rome, but tonight Mary dreams she is Jane in London. Asleep in her bed in New York, Mary cannot visit London. Although Mary’s mind is by nature infinite, she must freely allow her unlimited mind to assume the form of Jane’s limited mind in order to simultaneously manifest and know the streets of London, thereby realising one of the possibilities that exist within her. Amsterdam, Berlin, Tokyo, Vienna and Rome all exist in potential in Mary’s mind, but to experience one of those cities she has to give up all the other possibilities.

From Mary’s perspective, both Jane and the streets of London take place within her own mind. However, from Jane’s point of view, her own thoughts and feelings take place inside her mind, and the world that she sees – the streets of London – takes place outside her mind. In order to know the streets of London, Mary has to dream the world within…

view it. In the same way, consciousness precipitates the world within itself and, at the same time, becomes a separate subject of experience in that world, from whose…

Infinite consciousness needs an agency, a mechanism through which it can know or experience a multiplicity and diversity of objects, just as Mary needs the agency of Jane’s mind in order to perceive the streets of London. Infinite consciousness needs the agency of the separate self or finite…

Each of our minds is a dream in the infinite mind of consciousness. As such, each of our minds is the agency through which consciousness realises…

Likewise, all there is to each of our finite minds is infinite consciousness, and nothing that takes place within the dream of experience in each of our minds ever divides infinite, indivisible…

However, Jane experiences a multiplicity and diversity of objects and others, all of which seem to take place outside of herself. Based on the evidence of her senses Jane thinks, ‘The knowing or the consciousness with which I know the world lives in my brain.’ She notices that when she closes her eyes the streets of London disappear and when she opens them they reappear, and she reasonably concludes that whatever it is that is seeing the streets of London must be located just behind her eyes. Likewise, when she blocks her ears the sound of traffic disappears, and when she opens them it reappears, leading her to believe that whatever it is…

Jane believes that the knowing with which she knows her experience is located in and shares the limits and destiny of her body. However, the knowing with which Jane knows…

In order to know Jane’s finite experience Mary must overlook, forget or ignore the infinite nature of her own mind, although all Mary ever knows, even in the form of Jane’s mind, is her own indivisible mind. Similarly, consciousness must seem to overlook, forget or ignore its own nature in order to know the world, even though its experience of the world is in fact its experience of itself, albeit seen through the lens of the finite mind.

the same way, from the point of view of the separate self or ego, experience seems to be divided into two essential substances: matter is considered to be everything that exists outside of mind, from which the mind itself is considered to be derived. In other words, matter is considered to be primary and mind secondary, in contradiction with our experience.

Who is Jane? Jane is not a self, a person or an entity in her own right. She is an apparent limitation of Mary’s mind, but apparent only from her own illusory and ultimately unreal point of view. From Jane’s point of view she is a self, a person, an entity, a body. But that is simply a belief! Jane thinks that she has thoughts, whereas in fact she is a thought! She is a thought and a subsequent feeling that impose a limit on the true identity of Mary. This does not mean that Jane is unreal or non-existent. It simply means that she is an apparent but unreal limitation on the only ‘one’ that truly is: Mary. From Mary’s point of view, Jane is not a separate self or person. From Mary’s point of view there are no objects or selves, no real things in her dream, no entities with their own independent existence that can be defined by nouns. There is only the activity of her own mind, which is best described with verbs. In the new language of non-duality there are no nouns. Everything is understood as the activity of consciousness.

That separate and independently existing entity, called ‘I’, is unreal in the sense that it never actually exists in its own right. However, like all illusions, it has a reality to it. The reality of the water in a mirage is light, just as the reality of the landscape in a movie is the screen. The reality of Jane’s finite mind is Mary’s infinite mind. Jane is a process, not an entity. She is the agency through which Mary is able to manifest and know the world.

If Jane, Peter, Clare and John were to take the thought ‘I’ and trace it back, asking themselves the question, ‘What is the fundamental nature of the knowing with which I know my experience?’, each of their minds would begin to travel backwards or inwards towards the source of its knowing. In doing so their minds would gradually be divested of their limitations and, at some point, be revealed as Mary’s single, indivisible, infinite mind. Just as a slowly fading image is revealed to be made only of the screen, so the mind that investigates its own nature is revealed to be made only of infinite consciousness. The finite mind does not become infinite consciousness. It is relieved of its limitations and, as a result, stands revealed as the infinite consciousness that it always only is.

There is only consciousness, modulating itself in all forms of experience. Each world is a facet or cross-section of consciousness’s own infinite potential, the indivisible reality of all experience. The localisation of a temporary mind or temporary point of view actualises part of that potential.

The knowledge ‘I am’ is the shared light of infinite, indivisible consciousness refracted into an apparent multiplicity and diversity of selves or minds. It is for this reason that the spiritual traditions elaborate two paths, the paths of love and knowledge. Through the path of love or devotion, all feelings are traced back to their source

of love; through the path of knowledge, all experience is traced back to its source in infinite consciousness. The two paths are gateways to the same feeling-understanding.

However, there is a gentler way that this recognition may be evoked, and it is available to everyone under all circumstances. It is simply to ask ourself the question, ‘Who or what is it that is aware of my experience?’

It has no experience of its own appearance, evolution or disappearance. It never experiences itself being born, growing old or dying. However, from Jane’s point of view her mind seems to be contained within her body and to share its limits and destiny. Along with everyone else in her world, she is completely hypnotised by the limitations that her own mind superimposes upon her experience, and were it not for a single occurrence, she would never question this.

However, Jane is suffering, and her unhappiness causes her to strive ceaselessly for happiness. In fact, her entire life is orientated towards the relief of her unhappiness through the acquisition of objects, substances, activities, states of mind and relationships. She goes from one object or relationship to another, hoping that they will put an end to her suffering. Indeed, when she acquires the object, meets in friendship or merges in sexual intimacy, her suffering does come briefly to an end. As a result Jane believes that if she could just acquire more objects or have more relationships she would become happier and happier.

Mary realises, ‘My mind is unlimited. My mind never really assumed the limits of Jane’s finite mind. Jane was just a vehicle through which I was able to perceive London. But the knowing with which Jane knew her experience is my knowing! There is no real Jane, no real finite mind. Jane’s finite mind is my infinite mind! The “I” of Jane is me, the only “I” there is.

After this recognition we continue to experience objects, others and the world from the point of view of a separate subject of experience, but all are known, seen and felt to be our very own self. Maya remains but ignorance goes. As a result of this recognition there is a gradual purification or reorientation of the thoughts and feelings, and subsequent activities and relationships, that were previously based on the belief that ‘I’ – the knowing with which our experience is known, and out of which it is made – is temporary and finite. In the Christian tradition this is known as the Transfiguration. It is the outshining of all experience in the light of pure knowing, or, in religious terms, in God’s infinite being. In time this recognition is reflected and expressed in the absence of fear, lack or limitation and, as a result, the prevalence of love, compassion, justice, equity and humour.

Chapter 18 The Search For Happiness

The body appears in the mind as a series of sensations and perceptions, and the mind is a vibration of awareness. As such, the body is not something solid made out of matter but a condensation or localisation of and in awareness.

In order to effect this condensation or localisation, the unlimited, space-like presence of awareness must contract or collapse within itself. This contraction is an activity of awareness, and its maintenance requires energy. The contraction of awareness into a finite mind exerts a tension on itself which is always seeking to be relieved, just as the compression of a rubber ball sets up an inevitable tension that is always trying to expand or relax into its original neutral condition. This contraction of awareness is felt as the experience of suffering, and the inexorable force toward the natural state of equilibrium is felt as the desire for freedom, peace and happiness. Thus, the desire for happiness is simply the mind’s desire to be divested of its limitations and returned to its inherently relaxed, peaceful condition of eternal, unlimited awareness. The search for enlightenment is simply a refinement of the desire for happiness. It is an indication that the search has become conscious rather than simply instinctive. All human beings retain the memory of their own eternity within themselves, and it is for this reason that everyone without exception is motivated to seek freedom, peace, happiness and love above all else. Just as the screen is still visible in the image, and the echo of the Big Bang is said to be still discernible in the universe in the form of cosmic background radiation, so the original nature of awareness, which is peace, happiness and freedom itself, is discernible throughout all the mind’s activities.

However, this partial actualisation of awareness involves a trade-off: awareness must consent to limit itself in order to realise a segment of its infinite potential. In doing so, it allows its nameless, formless being to assume a name and a form. Through this consent, being appears as existence. In order to bring manifestation out of being and into existence, the infinite contracts into the finite. The tension that is created by this contraction is the longing for happiness.

The desire for happiness is the gravitational pull of our true nature on itself when it has lost itself in its own imagination. It is the pull from our true nature of perfectly free and inherently fulfilled awareness on the limitations of the finite mind. From the point of view of the individual, this pull is felt as desire or longing.

Awareness only seems to be missing because it is so completely present in all aspects of its creation that it cannot be distinguished from

The separate self is not an entity; it is the activity of this search. The separate self does not feel this wound; it is this wound. It is not the self that moves towards God; it is God that attracts the self. The movement of the self towards happiness is called desire; the pull on the self from happiness is called grace. As the sixteenth-century Italian monk realised, ‘Lord, Thou art the love with which I love Thee.’

Michael Cardew was an old Zen master: cantankerous and irascible on the one hand, warm-hearted and kind on the other. Coupled with a ruthless and penetrating intellect, this made him a disarming and formidable character, which for a young, idealistic man seeking meaning outside the parameters for which his education had thus far prepared him, was an intoxicating and irresistible invitation.

Just as a spider spins a web out of herself and then lives as a creature within that web, from which she now has to extricate herself, so consciousness imagines the world within itself and then identifies itself as one of the bodies in that world, from whose perspective it now seems to know it. Consciousness seems to become an inside self made of mind living in an outside world made of matter. Before the spider spins her web, it lies in potential inside her. The moment she spins her web, she becomes a spider that lives in that web, which now seems to be outside and distinct from herself. The spider has been reduced to a fragment, and the web

which she has given birth now seems to be her host. The web and the spider have changed places.

To live a life based on the assumption of such an ego or self is to live a life of ignorance – or, in the Christian tradition, sin – a life in which the reality of experience is ignored or denied. A life so lived generates, perpetuates and communicates the ignorance at its core; hence the current state of our world culture, which is almost exclusively dominated by the illusion of separation. The mind/matter divide at the heart of this illusion is the hallmark of materialism and the foundation upon which all conflict and unhappiness are based. All that the mind needs to do to know its own reality is to cease being exclusively fascinated by the objective elements of its experience – thoughts, feelings, sensations and perceptions – and ask itself instead about the nature of the knowing with which it knows that experience.

These desires are all facets of a single desire: the mind’s desire to be divested of its self-assumed limitations.

In this self-imposed initiation rite, they tasted and survived the terror of death and, as a result, felt for a few moments the joy of their own unconditioned existence, before the conditioned mind reasserted its strategies of denial and avoidance and eclipsed the peace and fulfilment that lie at its source. In that brush with death, the teenagers’ existential fear was exposed and fully felt, and in surviving the ordeal they briefly tasted that element in themselves, their essential being, that lies deeper than the ego. The sole purpose of the jump, the brush with death and the exposure of the fear was to artificially induce the taste of their own eternity.