The discovery that awareness is the witness of all objective experience partially liberates it from the limitations of the body in and as which it seemed to be located, but it is not a full liberation. The discovery ‘I am awareness or consciousness itself’ is not what is referred to as enlightenment or awakening, although … Continued
All that is or could ever be known of the ‘physical and natural world’ are sensations and perceptions, and of the ‘human mind and its functions’, thoughts, images and feelings. In other words, all that is or could ever be known of the physical world and the human mind is experience, and all experience takes … Continued
Every experience you have–the sight of these words, the breath you are taking, the sounds around you–is pervaded by a quiet knowing. That knowing, which we call ‘I’, is not something you possess but what you are. From it arise all thoughts, feelings and perceptions; within it the world appears.
These three–perception, feeling and thought–are the portals through which being expresses itself in form. Through these portals, being knows and celebrates itself in every form. What begins as reflection becomes remembrance–the recognition of the unity we have never left.
Simply be. All the methods, practices and pathways prescribed in the great traditions are preparations for the ultimate practice–the non-practice of simply being.
If you live in close proximity to nature, it impresses its being on you. This is why being in nature is itself a meditation. Beauty is both a portal and an expression of the one reality.
You do not need to get rid of anything, nor do you need to become anything. Simply return to the being that you always and already are. Be that knowingly. No effort is required unless, of course, you are temporarily lost in the content of experience. In that case, a gentle effort is needed to … Continued
When love is refracted through the mind–through the prism of thought and perception–it appears as relationship between the apparent parts of the whole.
If nature is infinite being clothed in perception, then friendship or relationship is infinite being, or love, clothed in feeling, and the teaching is infinite being, or pure consciousness, clothed in thought.
Our resistance to reality, not reality itself, creates suffering. We will find difficulty within our resistance to every stratum of life; it is within the psychological, emotional, physical, and spiritual realms where we stand in opposition to what is actually occurring. Every one of these levels needs full attention and investigation. They are not hierarchical; … Continued
Wise View reminds us that interconnection requires all experience to be connected within awareness. All things are seen for what they are, and nothing can be bypassed or omitted. The psychological story transforms itself into emptiness through the willingness to see the story as untrue, not from our desire to get over our pain.
The sense-of-self only knows how to handle problems and proceed using its story, which is composed of thoughts and emotions that have formed around past failures and successes. Though a specific problem may be partially resolved through our tried-and-true methods of the past, conditioned responses will never end suffering. Problems end when we perceive the … Continued
We may attempt to bring in a spiritual point of view to trump the psychological difficulty by thinking, “This too is empty; this too shall pass,” but that is a spiritual ploy and a diversion from our pain. Pain needs our understanding, not our cunning. We cannot get over a difficulty by employing our spiritual … Continued
The call of the Dharma is toward the difficult, not to find and rest within the comfortable. Each of us has the ability to immediately perceive why we are suffering, but many of us refuse to listen to this essential liberating feedback.
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.
What passes for the increasingly popular field of Consciousness Studies is, in almost all cases, a study of brain activity, not a study of consciousness. Only consciousness knows about consciousness. Only awareness is aware of awareness. Science is an activity of the finite mind, that is, an activity of thought and perception, and necessarily superimposes … Continued
Choosing Compassion – How to Be of Benefit in a World That Needs Our Love
When we believe our mind, we often judge others and feel anger toward them. We can even feel hatred for them. This causes us to feel separate from others. Not only do we feel separate from them, we feel that they are different, and we lose our sense of the interconnection that we share. We … Continued
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? Only the knowing with which all changing knowledge and experience are known. Only the experience of being aware or awareness itself. Only ‘I’.
If any thought, feeling, sensation or perception were identical to our essential nature of pure knowing, then every time a thought, feeling, sensation or perception disappeared we would feel that a little bit of ourself disappeared with it. Indeed, if thought, sensation or perception were inherent to the essential nature of mind or pure knowing, … Continued
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.