‘Consciousness is naturally one with all things. It is one with the totality of experience. However, at times, Consciousness contracts itself, shrinks itself into a body, and this self-contraction requires constant maintenance. Left without maintenance, the self-contraction gradually unwinds and Consciousness returns to its natural condition. Desiring and fearing are two of the main ways that Consciousness maintains its self-contraction as an apparent separate entity.
This book is a collection of contemplations and conversations about the nature of experience. Its only purpose, if it can be said to have any purpose at all, is to look clearly and simply at experience itself.
The essential discovery of all the great spiritual traditions is the identity of Consciousness and Reality, the discovery that the fundamental nature of each one of us is identical with the fundamental nature of the universe.
This book explores what it is that is truly experienced. ‘What is the nature of our experience in this moment?’ is the question that is returned to again and again. However, this is not a philosophical treatise. It is a collection of contemplations and conversations in which a few core ideas are explored over and over again, each time from a slightly different angle, and for this reason there is an inevitable element of repetition.
Likewise, having noticed the awareness behind and within each experience, do we lose sight of that awareness when we return the focus of our attention to the objective aspect of experience? Do we not now see the two, the apparent two, Awareness and its object, simultaneously as one? And has it not always been so? Do the words themselves affect the paper? Does it matter to the paper what is said in the words? Does the content of each experience affect the awareness in which it appears?
The Garden Of Unknowing
The abstract concepts of the mind cannot apprehend Reality, although they are an expression of it. Duality, the subject/object polarisation, is inherent in the concepts of the mind. For instance, when we speak of the ‘body’ we refer to an object, which in turn implies a subject. If we explore this object we discover that it is non-existent as such and is in fact only a ‘sensation’.
This deobjectification is the process of apparent involution through which That Which Cannot Be Named withdraws its projection of the mind, body and world, and rediscovers that it is the sole substance of the seamless totality of experience. That Which Cannot Be Named, the Absolute Emptiness into which the mind collapses, then projects itself, within itself, back along the same path of apparent objectification, to recreate the appearance of the mind, body and world.
That Which Cannot Be Named, and yet which is sometimes referred to as ‘I’, Consciousness, Being, Knowingness, takes the shape of thinking, sensing or perceiving in order to appear as a mind, a body or a world. This is the process of apparent evolution through which That Which Cannot Be Named gives birth to a mind, a body and a world, without ever becoming anything other than itself.
Each statement that is made here is provisionally true in relation to one statement but false in relation to another. However, it is never absolutely true. The purpose of every statement is to indicate the falsity of the previous one, only to await its own imminent demise. Each is an agent of Truth, but never true. Mind, in the broadest sense of the word, is made of concepts and appearances. It never frames or grasps Reality itself. However, by speaking in this way, mind is being used to create evocations rather than descriptions of the experience of Consciousness knowing itself. These evocations are temporary expressions of That Which Cannot Be Named, like flowers blossoming for a moment, shedding the perfume of their origin on the Garden of Unknowing.
Clear Seeing
All that is happening in these contemplations is the clear seeing of the essential nature of experience. There is no attempt to change or manipulate it, to create a peaceful or happy state, to get rid of suffering or to change the world. There is simply the clear seeing of the true nature of this current experience.
Even the purpose of ‘seeing clearly’ turns out to be too much in the end. It is the thorn that removes the thorn, and when even this last trace of becoming has been dissolved in understanding, it too is abandoned, leaving only Being.
It is the same with our experience. The contemplations in this book are like MRI scans of our experience. They look at experience from many angles, spreading it out, opening it up. However, our experience itself is always one. It is always a seamless, unified totality with no separate parts, and its nature is always only pure Consciousness. That is a fact of experience and it never changes, even if we think it to be otherwise.
It is ruthless and tender at the same time, and utterly simple.
In this case it has not yet been seen that what are considered to be our normal, commonsense assumptions are in fact themselves intellectual and abstract – that is, they have little to do with the facts of experience. By the end of the book I hope it will be clear that it is our conventional ways of seeing that bear little relation to our actual moment-by-moment experience.
However, it is precisely the idea that the body and the world exist as objects in time and space, independent and separate from Consciousness, that is intellectual and abstract. It is not based on experience.
What Truly Is
Whatever it is that is seeing and understanding these words is what is referred to here as ‘Consciousness’. It is what we know ourself to be, what we refer to as ‘I’.
We know that Consciousness is, and that everything is known by and through it. However, Consciousness itself cannot be known as an object.
So, if we do not know what Consciousness is, what ‘I’ am, but we know that it is, and if everything that we experience is known through or by this knowing Consciousness, how can we know what anything really is? All we can know for sure about an object is that it is, and that quality of ‘isness’ is what is referred to here as Being or Existence. It is that part of our experience that is real, that lasts, that is not a fleeting appearance. It is also therefore referred to as its Reality. We know that Consciousness is present now, and we know that whatever it is that is being experienced in this moment exists. It has Existence.
Many of our ideas and beliefs about ourself and the world are so deeply ingrained that we are unaware that they are beliefs and we take them, without questioning, for the absolute truth. For instance, we believe that we are a body, that we are a man or a woman and that we were born and will die. We believe that we are an entity amongst innumerable other entities, and that this entity resides somewhere in the body, usually behind the eyes or in the chest area.
We believe that objects exist independently of their being perceived, that Consciousness is personal and limited, that it is a by-product of the mind and that the mind is a by-product of the body. These and many other such beliefs are considered to be so obviously true that they are beyond the need of questioning. They amount to a religion of materialism to which the vast majority of humanity subscribes. This is especially surprising in areas of life that purport to deal explicitly with questions about the nature of Reality, such as religion, philosophy and art.
The only field available for enquiry is experience itself. This may seem almost too obvious to mention, but its implications are profound. It implies that we never experience anything outside experience. If there is something outside experience, we have absolutely no knowledge of it, and therefore cannot legitimately assert that it exists.
This in turn implies that if we are to make an honest investigation into the nature of Reality, we have to discard any presumptions that are not derived from direct experience.
All experience takes place here and now, so the nature of Reality, whatever that is, must be present in the intimacy and immediacy of this current experience.
The mind has built a powerful edifice of concepts about Reality that bears little relation to actual experience, and as a result Consciousness has veiled itself from itself. These concepts are built out of mind and therefore their deconstruction is one of the ways through which Consciousness comes to recognise itself – that is, to know itself again. Consciousness is in fact always knowing itself. However, through this deconstruction of concepts, Consciousness comes to recognise itself, not through the reflection of apparent objects, but knowingly and directly. Concepts are not destroyed in this process. They are still available for use when needed.
They have persuaded us to believe that ‘I’, the Consciousness that is seeing these words, is an entity that resides inside the body, that it was born and will die, and that it is the subject of experience whilst everything else, the world, the ‘other’, is the object.
We are open to the possibility that there is only one single, seamless totality, that Consciousness and Existence are one, that there is only one Reality. The edifice of dualistic ideas, which seems to be validated by experience, is well constructed, made up of beliefs at the level of the mind and feelings at the level of the body, tightly interwoven, mutually substantiating and validating one another.
We begin to experience ourself and the world as they truly are. Our experience itself does not change but we feel that it changes. Reality remains as it always is, for it is what it is, independent of the ideas we entertain about it. However, our interpretation changes, and this new interpretation becomes the cornerstone of a new possibility. This new possibility comes from an unknown direction. It does not come as an object, a thought or a feeling. It is unveiled, in most cases, as a series of revelations, each dismantling part of the previous edifice of dualistic thinking. And the unfolding of this revelation, in turn, has a profound impact on the appearance of the mind, the body and the world.
Consciousness veils itself from itself by pretending to limit itself to a separate entity, and then forgets that it is pretending. As a corollary to this self-limitation, Consciousness projects all that is not this ‘separate self’ outside of itself. This projection is what we call ‘the world’. Thus the separation between ‘I’ and ‘the world’ is born. In reality, this separation has never taken place. If we look for it, we can never actually find it. Ignorance is an illusion. It is an illusion that is wrought through the conceptual powers of the mind, through erroneous beliefs.
Our beliefs are the root cause of psychological suffering, and they are dismantled by a process of contemplative investigation.
Understanding is not created by a process in the mind, any more than blue sky is created by a clearing in the clouds. However, it may be revealed by the mind.
The body is simply the sensation of the body, and the world is simply the perception of the world.
And if we look clearly at the substance of mind, the substance of perceiving and sensing, we find that it is none other than the Consciousness in which it appears.
The mind, the body and the world are located inside Consciousness and are made only out of Consciousness. That is our experience. This is not a new experience that is arrived at through enquiry or meditation. It has always been our experience. We just may not have noticed it. In meditation we simply notice that this is always already the case.
Take the analogy of Consciousness as space, and imagine that this space, like Consciousness, is conscious and aware, that it has the capacity to see, to perceive, to experience, that it is an ‘experiencing space’. Now imagine what this space would perceive if it were to look for itself, if it were to look at itself. It would not see anything objective, because space cannot be perceived. It is empty, transparent, colourless and invisible. This perceiving space is too close to itself to be able to see itself.
The third is to see clearly that it is already only experiencing itself and always has been.
Consciousness is transparent, colourless, Self-luminous, Self-experiencing, Self-knowing, Self-evident. That is our experience in this moment.
Consciousness cannot be known by the mind. The mind is an object. It does not know anything. It is itself known by Consciousness.
The very best that the mind can do is to explore its own limits and come to the conclusion that it does not and cannot know what anything really is. However, this is a manner of speaking. There is no mind. Mind is simply the current thought, if there is a current thought. And a current thought cannot do anything or explore anything, any more than a lamppost can do or explore anything.
During the appearance of mind, That Which Is Ever-Present is the substance of that appearance and yet is apparently disguised as such. In this case Consciousness fails to recognise itself.
How can that which is the cause of all things be said to have a cause? What could cause Consciousness, if everything that might be a candidate for being such a cause is itself caused by Consciousness? Consciousness is its own cause, which is the same as saying that it is causeless.
Abide As You Are
Our objective experience consists of thoughts and images, which we call the mind; sensations, which we call the body; and sense perceptions, which we call the world. In fact, we do not experience a mind, a body or a world as such. We experience thinking, sensing and perceiving.
There is no need to make this witnessing Presence conscious. It is already so. There is no need to make it peaceful. It is already so. There is no need to wake it up. It is always already awake. There is no need to make it unlimited and impersonal. It is already so. And there is no need to make the mind, the body and the world peaceful. They are always moving and changing. We remain as we are and we allow the mind, the body and the world to be as they are. As we do so, the mind, the body and the world gradually return to their true place and their nature is revealed. We see that in fact they never left their true place, that they were never anything other than what they truly are. We simply stop imagining that they are distant, separate and other and, as a result, they stop appearing as such.
The space is independent of the people, although the people are dependent on the space. The space is present before the people arrive, it is present during their stay and it is present when they depart. In fact, it is present before the building was constructed and it will be present after it is demolished. It is always present.
Consciousness is what we are, and to be as we are is the highest form of meditation. All other meditations are simply a modulation of this meditation of abidance as we are.
At some stage it dawns on us that ‘I’ does not abide in its true nature. Who is there to abide in something other than itself? It simply is that. We simply are that and always have been. Even to say ‘always’ is not quite right, because ‘always’ implies an infinite extension in time. The idea of an infinite extension in time appears in the ‘I’, in Consciousness, from time to time, but the ‘I’ never appears in an infinite extension in time. It just is. ‘I’, Consciousness, just am.
The Drop Of Milk
Even when Consciousness is exclusively focused on objects, it never leaves itself. It just seems to forget itself from time to time. It seems to ignore itself. However, even as it ignores itself, something is known, and that knowing is the Knowingness of Consciousness knowing itself. Hence there is never any real ignorance.
For this reason, there is no answer to the question as to the cause or reason for ignorance. How can there be a cause or a reason for something that is non-existent? We cannot answer the question ‘Why?’ because the question itself creates the ignorance about which it is asking. It apparently creates time, cause and effect and, therefore, the appearance of ‘two things’, which are themselves found to be non-existent when the nature of experience is clearly seen.
When we think of anything other than Consciousness (or Truth or Reality or whatever word is used) we end up with a concept, an idea of that thing, which is not the thing itself. It is a representation of that thing in the mind’s code – that is, it is a concept.
as the mind tries to turn itself towards Consciousness, it dissolves. It is consumed in what is, from its own point of view, the nothingness of Consciousness. However, its dissolution is the revelation of Presence, the revelation of that in which thought dissolves.
It is a knowing, but not a knowing of something. It is pure Knowingness.
The mind does not find Truth. It does not find Reality. It is dissolved in it. The mind cannot release itself. It is itself released into the infinite expanse of Consciousness that is its ground.
We become what we think about. We are both the subject and the object of the thought that seeks Consciousness. For Consciousness, to know itself is to be itself and to be itself is to know itself.
Consciousness Shines In Every Experience
Meditation is not an activity. It is the cessation of an activity.
This understanding is a very efficient tool for undermining the belief that meditation is something that we do. Once we have fully understood that meditation is not an activity, the activity that we previously considered to be meditation will naturally come to an end. At that point, the understanding that meditation is not an activity has fulfilled its purpose and can also be abandoned. Once the thorn has removed the thorn, both are thrown away.
In order to understand that meditation is not an activity, we can use the example of a clenched fist. If we take our open hand and slowly close it tightly, an effort is required both to clench the hand and to maintain it in that contracted gesture. If we maintain the hand in this contracted gesture for some time, the muscles will become accustomed to this new position, and we will soon cease to be aware that a subtle effort is continually being applied in order to maintain it. If someone now asks us to open our hand, we feel that the opening of the hand requires an effort. At some stage, as we open our hand, we will become aware of the fact that we are not applying a new effort in order to open the hand, but rather that we are relaxing a previous effort, of which we were no longer even aware. The apparent effort to open the hand turns out to be the relaxation of the original effort to contract the hand. What appeared to be the initiation of an effort turns out to be the cessation of an effort.
This open, free, unlimited Consciousness has contracted upon itself. It has seemingly shrunk itself into the narrow frame of a body and a mind, and limited itself to a tiny location in a vast space and into a brief moment in an endless expanse of time. This is the primary self-contraction that open, free, unlimited Consciousness chooses from moment to moment of its own free will. It draws a line within the seamless totality of its experience and says to itself, ‘I am this and not that’, ‘I am here and not there’, ‘I am me and not other’. Feeling itself isolated and therefore vulnerable and afraid, this open, free, unlimited Consciousness now sets about supporting and protecting its new self-imposed identity as a fragment.
To effect this it reinforces its boundaries with layer upon layer of contraction. At the level of the mind these contractions are made out of desires and addictions on the one hand, and resistances, fears and rejections on the other. These are the many faces of our likes and dislikes, the ‘I want’ and the ‘I don’t want’.
In spite of this there are frequent intrusions into its own self-generated isolation which remind itself of its real nature…the smile of a stranger, the cry of an infant, an unbearable grief, a brief desireless moment upon the fulfilment of a desire, a moment of humour, the peace of deep sleep, a pause in the thinking process, a memory of childhood, the transition between dreaming and waking, the recognition of beauty, the love of a friend, a glimpse of understanding. These are moments that are offered to this now veiled presence of Consciousness, innumerable tastes of its own Freedom and Happiness, which remind it briefly of itself, before it is eclipsed again by the efficiency of the defences within which it has apparently confined itself.
The separate entity is something we, as Consciousness, do. It is not something we are.
If Consciousness believes itself to be a fragment, to be limited, to be bound and to appear in time and space, then the world will appear as the counterpart of that fragment. Having denied itself its own birthright, its own eternal, all-pervading status, Consciousness confers this same status on the world of appearances.
In fact, Consciousness never ceases to experience itself. Embedded within every experience is the taste of its own eternity. However, having conceptualised itself into a limited and separate entity, it has to account for its own intimate experience of Presence, of Being, elsewhere, and hence confers it on the ‘world’, on the ‘other’.
this way, time and space seem to become the ground and substance of Reality, the sine qua non of our experience, and Consciousness in turn seems to display the intermittent, limited, changing qualities that really belong to the world of appearances. Consciousness forgets that it has done this, that it is doing this, and as a result the world seems to inherit the characteristics of Consciousness. The world seems to become like Consciousness: solid, real, permanent and substantial.
William Blake expressed the same understanding as, ‘As a man is, so he sees.’ This could also be expressed, ‘As Consciousness sees itself, so the world appears.’ It is an almost watertight conspiracy, wrought of the freedom and creativity of Consciousness itself.
Whether we know it or not, we are always this open, free, unlimited Consciousness, and yet sometimes we forget this. It is our freedom to forget. Once we have forgotten, no other freedom is available to us, save the freedom to remember again.
Consciousness does not realise that it is already precisely what it is looking for, that it is already itself.
Even when Consciousness has veiled itself in a cloak of beliefs, doubts, fears and feelings, the taste of its own unlimited, free and fearless nature is embedded within every experience, and this taste is often experienced as a sort of nostalgia or longing. This longing is often wrongly associated with an event or a time in our lives, often in childhood, when things seemed to be better, when life seemed to be happier. However, this longing is not for a state that existed in the past – it is for the peace and freedom of Consciousness that lies behind and is buried within every current experience. What was present ‘then’ as ‘happiness’ was simply the unveiled presence of this very Consciousness that is seeing and understanding these words.
In doing so Consciousness forgets itself. It forgets its own unlimited nature. This forgetting is known as ‘ignorance’. It is Consciousness ignoring itself.
However, each time Consciousness returns to itself, each time it relaxes its fixation on a separate entity, each time it opens itself without choice or preference to the full spectrum of whatever experience is appearing within itself, it is, without knowing it, undermining the habit of Self-avoidance, the habit of avoiding its own Reality.
The impulse to contract into the separate entity is progressively undermined. Consciousness stays at home. The impulses to search, to seek, to avoid, to pretend, to contract keep appearing, but Consciousness is no longer compelled by them. It recognises the impulses but no longer acts on them. And, as a result, the frequency and ferocity of these impulses begin to subside. Consciousness no longer goes out of itself towards things. It stays at home within itself and things come to it. Things – that is, thoughts, feelings and perceptions – come to it, appear to it, arise within it, but Consciousness no longer needs to forget itself in order to experience the body, the mind and the world.
Consciousness realises that the separate entity that it previously took itself to be, is in fact simply an activity that it does, from time to time.
From the point of view of ignorance, the ‘person’ is what we are and ‘meditation’ is something that we do from time to time. From the point of view of understanding, ‘meditation’ is what we are and the ‘person’ is something that we do from time to time.
Ego
jar gives a shape to the space inside it. However, when the jar is broken the space inside it remains exactly as it always was and is, neither inside nor outside. In fact, it is the space that enables the jar to have a shape, not the other way round. The shape of the jar is just one of innumerable possibilities that are contained in potential within the space, including not having a shape at all. What is commonly referred to as ‘ego’, the separate entity, is the equivalent of the space, which is both inside and outside the jar, saying to itself, ‘I am the jar’. Ego is not an entity. It is an activity. It is an optional activity of identifying itself with a fragment that Consciousness is free to make or not, from moment to moment. It is the activity of thinking and feeling that ‘I’, this Consciousness that is seeing and understanding these words, am only this body/mind and not anything else that ‘I’ perceive.
The ego, as it is commonly conceived, is simply this habit of pretending and forgetting, perpetuated through inadvertence.
Consciousness has to go further and rediscover its absolute identity with all things. It has to discover that ‘I am everything’, that this Consciousness here is identical with that Reality out there. In other words, it has to discover that it is impersonal and unlimited.
This Knowingness, this Experiencingness, that is present within every experience, is the light of Consciousness. It illumines every experience. This Knowingness is known as ‘I’. It is our most intimate Self. ‘I’, identity, is Knowingness. Knowingness is not what I do. It is what I am.
Imagine that you have spent your whole life living in a large house, serving a demanding old man who lives in a room on the top floor. Although you never see the man, you spend from morning till night doing his chores. One evening, during a rare break, you are lamenting your fate to a friend. The friend suggests that you reason with the old man. When he hears that you never see him, let alone speak to him, he is puzzled and encourages you to go and find him. You are reluctant to begin with, but after several such encounters with your friend, you venture into the old man’s room. On your first visit you only have the courage to peep round the door, but you cannot see the man. When you report this to your friend he encourages you to be bolder and have a good look into the room. You make more visits to the old man’s room, and each time you search his quarters a little more thoroughly. It is only after several visits that you are convinced that there is no old man. However, such are your habits that for some time you continue to wake at six every morning and perform many of the tasks that you used to perform while serving the imaginary old man. Some of these habits cease immediately, whilst others take time to come to an end. In this story the old man is the separate entity and the friend is the teacher who encourages you to look inside and find out who this one that rules your life really is. As we look more and more deeply into the nature of ourself we find that there is no entity there. We spend our lives serving a non-existent entity. It is only our imagination that binds us, and it is clarity that liberates. In most cases this requires revisiting the issue many times, each time going a little more deeply into it, in order to be absolutely certain that there is no personal entity there. Even after this discovery, some of the habits of the body/mind that were developed while serving the non-existent old man may linger out of inertia, but in time they will dwindle. Our subservience to a separate entity consists, at the level of the mind, in the belief that ‘I am a separate, personal entity’, and at the level of the body, as a feeling that ‘I am this body’, or ‘I am in this body’. However, Consciousness is never actually bound by this belief or feeling. It just thinks and feels that it is. It pretends to bind itself by imagining itself as such, and therefore experiences itself as such.
Consciousness Is Its Own Content
In the analogy of the ocean, the waves are a metaphor for the appearances that arise upon or within the ocean of Consciousness. The content of the waves is water, just as the content of an appearance is Consciousness. The shape of the wave is the form that the water takes. It is the form of the appearance. ‘Wave’ is its name. But the content of that appearance is not wave. It is water. Similarly, in order to ‘appear’, Consciousness ‘clothes’ itself in name and form. It takes the shape of an appearance by projecting itself through mind and senses. However, the content of every experience is Consciousness itself.
When the waves die down, does their content disappear? No, the appearance of the waves ceases, but their content, the water, remains exactly as it always is.
It is disingenuous to say, ‘Everything is Consciousness, therefore I accept my suffering and negativity as an expression of that Consciousness and cannot, as a result, do anything about it.’ Suffering is already a rejection of the current situation, a lack of acceptance of the current situation as it is. This rejection is the counterpart of Consciousness’s exclusive identification with a body/mind. That is what suffering boils down to. If our credo is, ‘Everything is Consciousness, therefore everything is as good as anything else, therefore I cannot and need not change my suffering’, then why not apply that attitude to the current situation in the first place and welcome it exactly as it is? Instead of accepting our rejection of the current situation, why not simply accept the current situation itself? Suffering would cease right there. This so-called acceptance of the rejection of the moment is not the true, impartial, benevolent welcoming of everything within Consciousness. It is fear dressed up as understanding, pseudo-Advaita. As such, it is the very activity of ego itself, perpetuating its own isolation and misery. Ego is simply the exclusive mixture of impersonal Consciousness, which is seeing and understanding these words now, with a single body and mind. It is an activity of Consciousness or, more accurately, the shape that this impersonal Consciousness takes from time to time. Therefore, the Peace and Happiness that are inherent in Consciousness are also inherent in the ego, in the alleged separate entity, in the same way that gold is inherent in the earring.
It is the earring saying to itself, ‘I long to sparkle with the beauty and brightness of gold’, without realising that gold itself is already where its Existence, its Beauty, comes from. In the same way, every experience is only the presence of Consciousness shining.
Just as, in the conventional physical model of the world, we know that when we see objects we in fact see only light, so in reality when we see the appearance of objects, we know simultaneously that we in fact see only Consciousness.
From the point of view of mind, objects veil Consciousness. From the point of view of Reality, objects reveal Consciousness.
At that moment we realise that we were in fact always seeing the screen, but the screen appeared to have taken the name and the shape of the players, the pitch and the ball. The screen is never obscured by the appearance of the game. It is all we ever see. We just sometimes fail to notice it. The players seem to obscure the screen, but in fact they do not; rather, they reveal it. However, in doing so, they do not reveal something that is hidden. They reveal something – the screen – that is always in plain view, that is always being perceived, but is sometimes not noticed. The screen is not created by turning off the television. It is revealed by it and, by the same token, revealed to have always been present. When we turn the television on again, it becomes obvious that we are seeing the screen and the players simultaneously. The screen is the support and the substance of the players. The screen is not hidden behind the players. While the players are present, the screen and the players are one and the same thing. We cannot separate them. They are identical. We do not need to do anything special in order to understand that we see the screen and the players simultaneously. In fact, once it is obvious, it becomes absurd to think that the screen and the players are separate or different from one another. Having said that, turning off the television is necessary, in most cases, to draw attention to the presence of the screen, to show that the screen was there first, to show that the players depend on the screen but the screen does not depend on the players. Once this has become clear, we can turn the television back on again and not lose sight of this understanding.
Consciousness does not just perceive Reality. It is Reality. We can still enjoy the match. We can still get excited or disappointed by the drama but, either way, we know and feel that it is only the screen. It is only Presence that is dancing in this and every moment.
In this tradition, maya, appearance, is translated as the word ‘illusion’, with a slightly negative connotation. However, it is not the appearance that is illusory. It is its apparent independence and separation from Consciousness that is illusory. In the Tantric approach these very same appearances are understood to reveal and express the background itself, and therefore, in this tradition maya is seen as a creative display of energies that derives from their source and thus leads back to it.
Knowingness Is The Substance Of All Things
‘Experiencingness’ and ‘Knowingness’ are synonyms for ‘Consciousness’.
It is this agitation, the desire to experience Consciousness as an object, which seems to veil the experience of Consciousness knowing itself. In spite of this, Consciousness is in fact always knowing itself. It cannot ‘not know’ itself, because Knowing is its nature.
present. This belief is fuelled and substantiated by a deep sense of lack at the level of the body, the feeling, ‘I want something. I need something.’ Every time this sense of lack is relieved by the acquisition of a desired object, Consciousness briefly glimpses itself, and this experience is known as Happiness. In fact, it is not a brief moment. It is a timeless moment. However, it is not the acquired object that causes the Happiness. It is the dissolution of the sense of lack, which is apparently brought about by the acquisition of the object, that allows the pre-existing Happiness to be revealed.
So the relaxation of this desire to experience Consciousness an object, which actually prevents us from abiding as Consciousness knowingly, requires more than simply the understanding that Consciousness is not an object. It requires a deep sensitivity to the sense of lack, to the feeling that we need something that is not present in order to make us happy, to the feelings and impulses at the level of the body and how we escape them through thinking. Once this is understood, we no longer need the acquisition of an object to dissolve the sense of lack. We go directly to the sense of lack itself and face it as it is. We do not act on the impulse and escape it through thinking, desiring and acting. We have the courage to face it. We have the courage not to try to relieve it, not to do anything about it. We simply allow the feeling of lack to be fully present. We do not add anything to it. That is easy because we, Consciousness, are already the allowing or welcoming of all things.
Of course, desires continue to arise, but their purpose is no longer the avoidance of feeling nor the attainment of Happiness. Their purpose is to express Happiness. Their purpose – in fact, their nature – is to manifest, share and celebrate Happiness.
Our True Body
Experience always takes place now, in the present, so if we want to explore the nature of Reality, all we have is this current experience.
All that is necessary is to stick very closely to our actual experience and not rely on concepts or ideas from the past about the way we think things are. We have to come very cleanly to this exploration of experience and only permit that which we know for ourself to be true.
The purpose of doing this is to draw attention to the subjective aspect, to the Knower, the Perceiver, the Experiencer, to the presence of Consciousness, which witnesses whatever it is that is being experienced from moment to moment.
This presence of Consciousness stands alone, independent of any of the objects of the mind, body and world that appear to it, in the same way that a mirror stands alone, independent of whatever is reflected upon it.
We experience the mind (thoughts and images) and the body (sensations) in just the same way that we experience the world (sense perceptions). Each of these experiences is equally an object of Consciousness. The mind and the body are no less objects of Consciousness than is the world.
Consciousness is not simply the witness but also the substance of every object that appears within it. Every object is made out of Consciousness. It is an expression of Consciousness. To begin with, we understand objects as appearing to Consciousness. Then we understand that they appear in Consciousness. Then we understand that they appear as Consciousness. In this way Consciousness reabsorbs the body, the mind and the world into itself. Even that formulation is not quite right, because it suggests that an object has somehow come from outside and has appeared within Consciousness, that Consciousness takes the object into itself. However, Consciousness is there first, before the appearance of any object. The very first experience we ever had as a newborn infant was experienced by this very Consciousness that is present now, seeing these words.
It realises that everything is included within itself and is an expression of itself. It goes beyond subject and object. Subject and object collapse into that which is behind, beyond and within both. We could call this Being. Consciousness becomes something, then nothing, then everything, and yet always remains itself. Consciousness is known as the perceived, then the perceiver, then the perceiving, and yet throughout this process, Consciousness remains always only itself.
There is only Consciousness, there is only Being, which simultaneously creates, witnesses, expresses and experiences itself in every experience we have.
It is for this reason that the Kashmiri Shaivites called this exploration of experience a yoga of ‘wonder, astonishment and delight’. We simply stand open, empty, silent, unknowing and wondering. Of course, into this openness, formulations arise that are appropriate responses to the current situation. They come from the situation itself and as a result they are hand-in-glove with it.
We clothe Reality in name and form.
Time is the first language of the mind. Space is the first language of the senses. Remove time and space from experience – that is, remove name and form – and we are left with the oneness of Consciousness/Existence. We are left with timeless, spaceless Presence, with Being. Being shines in the self as Consciousness and in the world as Existence.
Consciousness takes the shape of every appearance, although it is itself shapeless, just as water takes the shape of a wave, although it is itself shapeless.
Most activities are governed by the desire for Happiness. Happiness is a non-objective experience. It is simply the presence of Consciousness.
Once it is understood that Happiness cannot be a memory, it has to be concluded that the desire for Happiness comes from the current experience itself, even if the experience is unpleasant. Where else could it come from? However, it is not from the objective aspect of the current experience that Happiness is sought. It is from the knowing or experiencing aspect.
Once this is clearly seen, the nature of desire changes radically. An object is no longer desired in order to produce Happiness but rather to express it.
Consciousness Is Self-Luminous
‘When the sun rises do you not see a round Disc of fire somewhat like a Guinea?’ O no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying ‘Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.’ – WILLIAM BLAKE
A more accurate metaphor would be that of a vast, limitless space of which every part is conscious, sensitive, aware. The nature of this space is to be conscious. It cannot turn off this consciousness. Imagine that within this limitless space, several holographic images, each of a house with many rooms, are projected. Each room is like a separate body/mind. What happens to this limitless space when the holograms are projected? Does it change in any way?
In fact, there is no inside and no outside to this space, because the houses are made out of exactly the same substance as the space in which they appear. Even to say that the houses appear in the space is not quite right, because they do not come into the space. They ex-ist: they arise out of the space itself. Their substance is made of that in which they arise. That which gives them Existence is the substance out of which they arise. The space is their Existence. They are made out of the substance of the space.
The same is true of our experience. The substance of all appearances is the Presence in which they arise.
That which sees is that which is seen.
The Choice Of Freedom
Every experience arises spontaneously out of the absolute freedom of Consciousness at every moment, and in that sense Consciousness is free to take any form it chooses, out of an infinity of possibilities.
It is true that the separate entity has no freedom, but as there is no separate entity, why mention it? Consciousness, that which we are, is freedom itself. We, as Consciousness, have absolute freedom. We are absolute freedom. The feeling that we have the freedom to make a choice is a pale and usually misinterpreted reflection of this intuitive knowledge of our own innate freedom. As a reflection of real freedom it is true, but the interpretation that this freedom is the freedom of an individual entity is false.
And if there is no separate, independent Consciousness, how can there be a separate, independent thinker, chooser, doer, enjoyer, experiencer? Our experience is one of a stream of appearances in Consciousness.
Each is utterly unique and each disappears absolutely before the next arises. Imagine a series of events as follows: Event A is the hearing of rain. Event B is the thinking, ‘Let’s have some tea.’ Event C is the tasting of tea. Event D is the feeling of satisfaction. Event E is the perceiving of traffic. Event F is the thought that ‘I’ didn’t cause the rain but heard it, that ‘I’ chose to have tea and enjoyed it, that ‘I’ perceived the traffic but did not create it, and finally that ‘I’ remained over after all these experiences had vanished. The ‘I’ in this stream of events is itself simply another appearance just like all the rest. The ‘I’ is the thought ‘I’. However, when the hearing of rain is present, the ‘I’ thought is not.
This little ‘I’ thought then vanishes before the next thought, ‘I enjoy this tea’, appears, and reappears again after it to fill the gap. In this way innumerable ‘I’ thoughts are strung together and conceived, by a subsequent thought, to have existed as the permanent entity that is present between and behind all appearances. However, it is Consciousness, not a separate entity, which is ever-present between and behind every perception.
To think that event F, the ‘I’ thought, did not cause event A, but did cause event B, is inconsistent with our experience and defies logic. This lack of consistency is called the ‘person’, the ‘separate entity’, the ‘chooser’.
The idea of causality falls apart completely when it is understood that experience is not a series of events appearing in Consciousness, but rather that it is Consciousness itself taking the shape of hearing, thinking, tasting, enjoying, perceiving, and so on. Our experience is not a series of events. It is one ever-present event, one ever-present non-event. Consciousness. Being. Reality. Immoveable, unchanging, homogeneous. What is there to cause what, if Consciousness is all there is?
The Ease Of Being
Language cannot describe this, because even in attempting to describe it there is a reference to two things, the object and Consciousness. Two words are used whereas in fact there are never two things.
The identity of an object is the identity of Consciousness.
It thinks, ‘I am this cluster of sensations, the body, but not that group of perceptions, the world.’ Therefore, it is not so much the ‘I am the body’ idea but rather the ‘I am only the body’ idea that is problematic.
Consciousness transitions from ‘I am something’ to ‘I am nothing’, and then from ‘I am nothing’ to ‘I am everything’, without ever being or becoming anything other than itself.
Consciousness never really returns to itself. It just abides knowingly in and as itself. It no longer pretends to be other than it is.
At the very moment the king abdicated his royal powers, he gave up his Freedom, of his own free will. His Freedom expressed itself as the desire not to be free. From that moment on he seemed to be bound and the circumstances of his life seemed to confirm his new status. In this state, the only freedom available to the ‘king pretending to be an ordinary person’ is the freedom to remember himself again as he truly is. It is only when the king reclaims his royal identity that he realises that although he thought, felt and behaved as though he were bound, in fact he was always free. He realises that his status as an ordinary person was self-imposed and imaginary, and that even when he was deeply involved with the traumas of being an ordinary person he was, nevertheless, always the king. There was nothing that could be done or, more importantly, that needed to be done, to reclaim his birthright, other than simply to recognise it and to start behaving accordingly. As the peasant, the king had no freedom other than to remember his true identity. As the king he always had complete freedom.
Within every experience there is something that perceives and there is something that is perceived, whatever that something is. Whatever it is that perceives is referred to as ‘subject’ and whatever is perceived is referred to as ‘object’. We conceptually separate the Perceiver from the perceived in this way, although this time it is not the body/mind that is the subject, the perceiver, and the world that is the object, the perceived. Rather, it is Consciousness that is the perceiving subject and the mind/body/world that is the perceived object.
This could be called the return of the prodigal son. The moment of looking back towards the father is the moment of recognising that Consciousness is present.
The moment the son takes a step towards the father, he begins to unite himself, his experience, with the father. The world of objectivity – or rather, ‘Consciousness lost in the world of objectivity’, which is represented by the son – is reintegrated with the father. In reality, it is the father who comes running to meet the son. It is Consciousness that reclaims the world of objectivity.
The father knows that the son never leaves the kingdom, but the son – that is, ‘Consciousness believing itself to be an object’ – has forgotten this, and so he has to return. In reality the son is reclaimed, not returned.
From the point of view of Consciousness there is no transition; there is simply a flow of changing appearances, and sometimes no appearances at all, in its own ever-present Reality. That which is deep sleep, timeless Presence, does not disappear in order for the dreaming and waking worlds to appear. It simply remains as it always is and, at the same time, takes the shape of the dreaming and waking worlds.
another. Nobody falls asleep and nobody wakes up. When viewed from the perspective of the waking state, deep sleep is a state. When viewed from its own perspective, it is timeless Presence.
Time Never Happens
All we have is experience. The mind is simply the experience of the mind. The body is simply the experience of the body. The world is simply the experience of the world.
However, if we look at our experience and refuse to admit concepts that do not correspond directly with it, we see clearly that this model of time simply does not reflect its nature. All experience is Now, and Now is ever-present. However,
For instance, the term ‘ever-present’ is used to describe the Now, but ‘ever’ already implies duration in time, and ‘present’ implies a past and a future. ‘Eternity’ is a word that is used to indicate this ever-present Now, and although it has become associated with an infinite amount of time, in its original meaning it is perhaps the closest word that is available to convey the immediacy and reality of Now.
Consciousness creates the appearance of time by bestowing its own continuity on objects and then forgetting that it has done so.
Consciousness realises that it does not receive attention but gives attention. And subsequently it realises that it does not give attention. It is attention. Attention is Consciousness with an object. When the object vanishes, attention simply remains what it always is, Consciousness.
The Being that shines in all experience is known in ourself as the experience ‘I am’. In the world it is known as ‘It is’. We share the Presence that we are with all things.
We should rely only on the facts of our experience, and that means this current experience. That is the test of Reality, of Truth. In this investigation we have to be innocent like a child and honest like a scientist: innocent in the sense that we take every experience as if we were experiencing it for the first time, which is in fact the case, and honest in the sense that we stick to our actual experience and distinguish what we think we experience from what we actually experience.
There is the Reality or Existence of nature, which is ‘always the same’. There is the appearance of nature, in which ‘nothing lasts’. And there is the ‘us’, that is, Consciousness, which is aware of the appearances.
We experience this vividly every time we wake from a dream. The appearance of the dream seemed to be real, but on waking we discover that it was only a fleeting appearance within Consciousness. The tiger in our dream seems to be real, but on waking we discover that it was made of mind, and mind simply comprises appearances in Consciousness. Consciousness is the Reality of mind. The tiger in the dream is unreal as ‘tiger’ but real as Consciousness. When the tiger is present there is a reality to it. The reality of the tiger is Consciousness, which is its support, its substance and its witness.
The substratum and the substance of the appearances in the dream and the waking states, their Reality, is identical and it remains after appearances have vanished. The appearance is made only of its underlying Reality. The image in the mirror is made only of mirror.
Change is in appearance only. There is only Reality taking the shape of this, and this, and this. How could something that is real become unreal? Where would its Reality go? How could something whose nature, whose substance, is Reality become something else, become non-Reality?
William Blake expresses the same understanding when he says, ‘Every bird that cuts the airy way is an immense world of delight enclosed by the five senses.’ He uses the bird as a symbol of nature. He is saying that the Reality of the bird is ‘an immense world of delight’, but that its Reality is veiled by the senses. By using the word ‘enclosed’, he suggests that the senses somehow limit Reality. They condition its appearance. It is significant that Blake describes the Reality of nature, of an object, as ‘delightful’. Cézanne also says that the Reality of nature, which he calls her ‘Eternity’, is experienced as a ‘thrill’. Both Blake and Cézanne are suggesting that inherent in the oneness of Consciousness and Reality is the experience of delight, that the experience is thrilling.
there is no separation between ‘I’ and ‘other’, between ‘me’ and ‘you’, between ‘me’ and the ‘world’, between chit and sat.
The experience of this realisation is known in India as ananda, which has traditionally been translated as ‘bliss’. However, this translation can be misleading. It suggests that the realisation of Oneness is considered to be accompanied by a rare and exotic state. And this in turn initiates the search for an extraordinary experience, for something that is not simply this.
In classical Greece this experience was described as Beauty. Beauty is not the attribute of an object. It is inherent in the fundamental nature of experience. It is the experience of recognising that Consciousness and Reality are one. Such sacred works of art stir a deep memory in us. We recognise something in them. In this recognition Consciousness is recognising itself. Consciousness is remembering its own Reality, its own Being. It looks in the mirror of experience and sees itself. It experiences its own Reality. Such works of art give us the ‘taste of Eternity’.
Consciousness is one with itself and with all things. ‘I am that I am.’ There is nothing present in Consciousness except itself. Consciousness is empty of objective content, of everything that is not itself. This emptiness contains all things. It is a pregnant emptiness.
Consciousness knows an object by being that object. Its being an object is one of its modes of knowing itself. Consciousness can never know an object. It can only know itself. Its knowing itself is its being itself. The Existence of an object is its Being or ‘Isness’. This Being is the knowing of Consciousness knowing itself.
An object derives its Being from Consciousness, from ‘Amness’. Being is present in every experience. Consciousness is that Being. In the knowledge that ‘I am’, Consciousness and Being are one. When this is known, the mind, the body and the world become transparent and luminous. They shine with Presence, as Presence.
Instead of allowing everything to flow freely through itself, as the creator, witness and substance of all appearances, it focuses on some objects in favour of others. Oneness seems to separate itself into Amness and Isness. Amness becomes ‘I’ and Isness becomes ‘other’.
The ‘I am’ which became ‘I am That’, ‘I am everything’, in the presence of appearances, now becomes ‘I am that particular thing’, ‘I am something’.
Upon waking from the dream we discover that the ‘individual person’ who seemed to be the experiencer of the dream was in fact experienced within the dream.
It is for this reason that the waking state is sometimes referred to as the waking dream. The appearance of the separate entity in the waking state is essentially the same as that in the dream state. In both cases it has no Reality of its own. In both cases its Reality is Consciousness.
However, at no point does it actually become a limited entity or a separate person. It just imagines itself to be so, and because it imagines this to be so, it seems to experience itself as such.
The Here And Now Of Presence
All experience takes place here. This here is not a physical space. It is the space of Consciousness in which all experiences, including the apparent experience of space, takes place. A distant sound takes place here.
All bodily sensations take place in the same placeless place, which is here. It is not that Consciousness is present everywhere. It is that everywhere is present here. This here is not a location inside the body. The body is a sensation inside this here, inside Presence.
Once it is understood and felt that everything takes place ‘here’, ‘inside’ Consciousness, the idea that experiences take place ‘there’ or ‘outside’ vanishes. However, the ideas of ‘here’ and ‘inside’ need their opposite, ‘there’ and ‘outside’, to have any meaning.
This now does not last in time. All time lasts in it.
And there is a great freedom of expression that is available to a true teacher, which will cover a wide range of formulations, including ones that may sometimes seem to contradict one another. It is true that anything said in words, anything the mind produces, has a level of relativity to it, and hence a degree of untruth, a lack of completeness. What is important is the deep understanding behind the words.
And likewise, if the ‘absolute truth’ is spoken by one who is parroting the truth and thus does not come from true understanding, the answer will lack depth, and that will be transmitted.
IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN SO Every experience, every appearance, is a wave on the ever-present ocean of Presence. If we look at the waves they change from moment to moment. If we look at the water, the water itself never changes. The water never comes and goes. Nothing ever happens to the water itself. The same is true of experience. Where does one appearance go when the next one appears? And what happens to the substance out of which the first appearance was made when that appearance disappears? How could that substance disappear? How could something become nothing? And where did the substance from which the first appearance was made come from? Can nothing become something?
The flow of a river always changes shape, but the substance of a river never disappears.
With one exception, Reality cannot be touched by the mind, although the mind is always shining with its light, in the same way that the moon shines with the sun’s light. That exception is the thought about Reality itself. When we think about the nature of Reality, the mind comes to its own limit, because Reality is beyond the abstract concepts of the mind and therefore has no objective characteristics. It is like a man who runs towards a precipice and comes to the edge. If he proceeds he plunges into the void and dies. The thought that seeks Reality comes to its own limit and plunges into Reality itself. It dies in that which it was seeking, and its dissolution is the revelation of that ever-present Reality.
We do, however, remember the impact of this non-objective experience at the level of the body and the mind. This impact is often confused with the non-objective experience of Consciousness knowing itself and, as a result, these states of the body/mind become the object of intense seeking that sometimes lasts a whole lifetime. These states, like all states, come and go. They are by nature impermanent, so by seeking them Consciousness is condemning itself to an endless cycle of becoming, in which the failure to secure Happiness is intrinsic.
JUST THIS How is it that there seem to be so many contradictions in expressions of the same teaching, the same understanding? Some teachings will state the absolute truth over and over again, in various ways, whilst others will appear to condone the separate entity by entertaining ideas in which an apparent person is included. For instance, one may state, ‘You have no freedom’, and another may state, ‘You have complete freedom’. If the first statement is addressed to an alleged person, an apparently separate entity, then it is true. If it is addressed to the Presence that we are, the Consciousness that is seeing and understanding these words, it is false. Conversely, if the second statement is addressed to Presence it is true, if to the ‘person’, false. So the words are relative to their context, but we should not conclude from this that their meaning is relative. Both answers express the same understanding. It is the Understanding from which the answer comes, rather than the content of the words themselves, that is important. That Understanding is not something that is known. It is Silence itself. This Silence is not a blank object. It is not an absence of sound, which in fact is no Silence at all. It is the background of Presence, which is the support and substance of all appearances, including an absence of sound. It is an alive, open unknowingness that is free to take any shape or any position at any moment, in relation to the moment itself.
The words are the packaging. Once the message, this unknowing openness, is delivered, or rather revealed, the packaging can be discarded. The words can be forgotten. In this way the teaching remains free of fixed formulations, dogma and fundamentalism. It remains fluid, playful, enjoyable, unpredictable and ungraspable. It always leaves us in open unknowingness. This open unknowingness is what we are. It is not something that we know.
LOVE IN SEARCH OF ITSELF What is the value and function of spiritual seeking? The purpose of seeking, at the level of the body, is to bring about Happiness, and at the level of the mind, to bring about Understanding. Inherent in seeking, therefore, is the feeling and the belief that Happiness and Understanding are not already present, and that they can be brought about through the search. In other words, Happiness and Understanding are construed as intermittent states that can be attained at some future time as a result of an activity and, by implication, that can be lost. When a desire is fulfilled, Happiness is experienced. When a question is answered, Understanding is revealed.
Desire at the level of the body, and seeking at the level of the mind, are in most cases forms of agitation. They are modulations of a sense of lack, a sense that something is not right, that something needs to be secured or known. This agitation is an activity within Consciousness and is an expression of Consciousness. Everything, literally everything, takes place within Consciousness and is an expression of it.
Consciousness no longer projects the thought and feeling, ‘I am not present and therefore need to find myself somewhere else’. It withdraws this projection and as a result experiences itself as it is, tastes itself, has a glimpse of itself. With the withdrawal of this projection, our longing is taken back to its source.
Happiness cannot have a cause. Only unhappiness can have a cause.
Happiness is not relative. It does not come and go, any more than the sky comes and goes. The fact that it seems to appear and disappear is obviously true on the relative level, just as the sky seems to appear and disappear. However, that does not make it absolutely true. Happiness, like Beauty and Love, is absolute, not relative. They are all inherent in Consciousness, and as such they do not change or disappear. They are the experience of Consciousness knowing itself, knowingly.
Openness, Sensitivity, Vulnerability And Availability
If I’m honest, I want to get rid of my suffering. The ultimate cause of suffering is ignorance of our true nature, that is, the ignoring of our true nature, the ignoring of Consciousness. We take that which is unreal to be real and that which is real to be unreal. All objective experience – that is, the mind, body and world – is made out of thinking and imagining, sensing, and seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling. What happens to our entire objective experience, including all of our suffering, when all of these are removed? It vanishes. Where is suffering in deep sleep? It is non-existent.
Suffering, by definition, requires the presence of a separate entity for its existence. However, that separate entity is itself non-existent, imaginary. What can we say therefore of this separate entity’s suffering? It is no more real than the entity around which it revolves, although of course it is a powerful illusion.
And what would happen if Knowing or Experiencing were removed from them? They would vanish. Knowing or Experiencing is the ingredient which is common to them all, and without which none of them exist. Thinking, imagining, sensing, seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling are the particular forms that Knowing or Experiencing takes. And what is Knowing or Experiencing made of? It is made of that which is conscious, that which knows and experiences. That is, it is made of Consciousness, and this Consciousness is our most intimate Self. What happens if we try to remove Consciousness? We cannot. We cannot go further back in our experience than Consciousness.
We have acknowledged that the known is made of Knowing and that Knowing is made of Consciousness. You, I, We, Consciousness is the Reality of all things. That is our moment-by-moment experience. It is our lived, intimate, direct experience, not simply an intellectual idea. That which seems to be real in every experience is a ripple within the ocean of our Self. It is made out of mind-stuff, thinking, sensing and perceiving, and it vanishes in the same way that the mind-stuff out of which a dream is made vanishes. However, the substance of that mind-stuff is our Self, Consciousness. It seems to be unreal and non-existent from the point of view of objective experience, but in fact it turns out to be the very essence, the Reality of that experience.
The only problem is that we take that which is unreal to be real and that which is real to be unreal. And even that is not a problem, because that very appearance, that apparent problem, is itself made out of the ever-present, unchanging Reality of our Self, Consciousness.
This collapse of the mind as it tries to ‘see’ or ‘understand’ Consciousness reveals the ever-present Consciousness that was veiled by the very activity of seeking. This does not deny the validity of seeking. On the contrary, it validates it! The value of seeking is that as long as it is taken all the way back to its Source, it brings itself to its own limit and dissolves there. That into which it dissolves is that for which it was seeking.
If seeking is not denied or frustrated, if it is allowed to run its full course, it will come to its natural limit. However, it is Consciousness that dissolves the seeking thought, just as water dissolves a sugar cube. Seeking should be allowed to run its course, for it is in the dissolution of thinking, not in the frustration of thinking, that Consciousness is revealed, that Consciousness tastes itself. Seeking never finds what it is looking for. It is dissolved in it. From the mind’s point of view, it is the end of seeking, rather than its fulfilment, that brings about the revelation of Presence. From the point of view of Reality, it is the experience of Consciousness recognising itself that brings about the end of seeking.
Only then will the mind come to an end naturally in Understanding. This Understanding is itself the experience of Consciousness knowing itself knowingly.
When we go into a darkened room, we see nothing to begin with. Slowly shapes start to emerge until in the end we see quite clearly. We do not have to do anything to facilitate this. It happens naturally. Likewise, Understanding, which is not a knowing of something, but rather Knowingness itself, permeates every aspect of our life from an unknown direction. It just happens naturally. On the outside there may or may not be much change. That is not important. But on the inside there is more and more Peace, Freedom, Happiness and Love. Old habits still come up, but as they are no longer fuelled by mistaken ideas, they show up less and less frequently. This change happens either gradually or rapidly. It doesn’t matter. Who is the one that cares? That one is non-existent. Perhaps some of these habits may stay around forever. So what? We all have characters that are conditioned at the level of the body and mind.
‘Individual’ means undivided. Individuality is the unique expression of the undivided whole, which each body/mind expresses, and it tends to flourish rather than diminish when we are relieved of the straitjacket of ignorance – that is, when we stop ignoring our Self. Similarly, Non-Duality is not an immunisation against feeling. In fact, it is the opposite. It is complete openness, sensitivity, vulnerability and availability. Actually, suffering is our resistance to feeling, rather than a feeling itself.
Consciousness is absolute Freedom. We allow this Freedom to express itself as it will, how it will, where it will and when it will. In one body/mind this might take the shape of a character that is quiet and sensitive, whilst in another it may express itself in a wild and exuberant way. We should not be misled by appearances. It is the attitude of inner freedom that is the hallmark of…
What part do feelings and the body have to play in this…
Sooner or later, these uncomfortable feelings begin to percolate through the strategies and coping mechanisms that the mind has constructed. The first impulse is usually to escape them through thinking and activity. In this way the cycle of seeking is generated over and over again. However, each time seeking is brought to an end in Understanding, one of the mind’s avenues of escape is cut off. As a result, when uncomfortable feelings resurface, we find that there are fewer and fewer possibilities of denial and avoidance. We no longer escape these feelings. We have the courage to face them. We do not do anything with them or to them and, by the same token, we do not deny, avoid or suppress them. The impulse to escape them through thinking still appears, but that impulse itself is seen to be just one more uncomfortable…
The openness, sensitivity, vulnerability and availability that Consciousness is, that we are, is the allowing of all things. This courage and openness to face our feelings is an invitation for deeper and deeper layers of feeling to emerge. It is for this reason that, to begin with, the spiritual path does not always appear to be peaceful. Often there is an apparent increase in the level of discomfort and agitation. However, that is a misinterpretation of what is really occurring. It is…
However, as there is less and less impulse to avoid them, the welcoming space in which they are allowed to be, without any agenda for or…
In this way they lose their bite. They are neutralised, not because we have done anything to them, but simply because they have been seen for what they are. Even to say that they are bodily sensations is too much. If we explore them in the same way that we explore any other object, we find that their very substance is the substance of the welcoming Presence in which they
TIME AND MEMORY It is often said that time is an illusion, but if I look back at my life, memories seem to validate the existence of time. Memory seems to validate time, but if we look at it closely we see that it in fact validates the timeless changelessness of Consciousness. Memory creates the appearance of time, in which objects are considered to exist independently from one another, and through which they are considered to evolve.
The idea that time is like a container that houses all the events of our lives is in fact a temporal representation of Consciousness in the mind. Likewise, the idea that space is like a container that houses all the objects in the world is a spatial representation of Consciousness in the mind. Events do not appear in time and objects do not appear in space. They both appear in Consciousness.
How then can a non-existent object be remembered? It cannot. An object is never remembered.
Desiring and fearing are two of the main ways that Consciousness maintains its self-contraction as an apparent separate entity.
As soon as a desire is fulfilled it comes to an end. The end of the desire is the end of the maintenance of the self-contraction and, as a result, Consciousness returns to itself – that is, it experiences again its own unlimited nature. This experience is called Happiness. Consciousness does not in fact return to itself. It just recognises itself. It knows itself again as this unlimited openness, welcoming, sensitivity. It no longer pretends to be other. It no longer hides itself from itself. Consciousness has become so accustomed to shrinking itself into the frame of a body and a mind that the release from this self-contraction is often accompanied by a sense of elation or expansion.