Can we imagine a question more basic than - what is awareness?
In recent years I have heard many people say that from the perspective of awareness not only does nothing matter, but nothing is happening. I’ve also heard that awareness has no preferences.
The first thought that occurs to me when I hear that statement is the question, I gotta wonder if this person would say the same thing if I started sawing off his fingers? Of course, our philosophical person would respond by saying, of course it matters to the body/mind but to awareness it’s all nothing - literally nothing.But let’s go there right now. Let’s just take a look at what is really happening right here and right now.
Well, I would like to explore whether that is what awareness really is.
I look around. Double click on the video file below:
What do I see? What do you see?
What you are seeing
is awareness. The source of awareness and the content of awareness cannot be separated. They are one thing - one motion.
But let’s look just a little deeper. What is seeing? Isn’t it true to say that seeing also has an emotive quality to it? We see and in that seeing there is a quality of feeling. It could be positive, negative or anywhere in between. Thoughts arise spontaneously. I
know what I am seeing or this is interesting or I’ve seen this a million times before. All of this is the content of awareness.
We can’t help but notice that awareness is so much than just seeing. We are not a robotic camcorder. We see with intelligence wedded to feeling.
Within this seeking there an
energy of guidance. It feels like the immediate future draws our awareness into it. The Now is drawn, inexorably, into it. It’s not a product of thought. It’s all happening so fast that, if anything, it is that which produces thoughts and feelings, but is neither. “It” all happens even before it is seen by awareness.
Thus it is the motion of change through which thoughts and feelings are created.
Feel the next moment
suck you into its being. It can’t be stopped. The birth of this next moment is happening at the speed of light - yet it is silent and unseen. If we open to its raw immediacy, we will see that this is enlightenment itself. It has nothing whatsoever with the “thought” of the individual person named Eric.
Enlightenment had nothing to with our thoughts about it.
It is the very “isness” of life that can only happen without any of our effort. This sucking energy holds everything. It is all-powerful. If the mystery has a key at all, it can only be found here and it is further seen that wisdom is held by this immediacy of change. Wisdom, action, are all manifestations of this sweeping energy.
It is not even a process. A process is something that goes from A to B to C to n. This is the unchanging - ever-changing wholeness moving. Where and how it goes, no one knows.
The freer we are of ALL belief, the more alive we are to this constant guiding motion. We never again need to worry or concern ourselves with the future, for we see - we see that our thoughts were wedded to a belief in a separate me that lived somewhere on the bank of Life. As we seen this all-powerful, irresistible movement propel itself, we see that no separate self could be found. Everything we “see” is really just the movement of Life. If you would like to call that awareness, then so be it. The belief in an observer is an add-on created by thought ... just another island in a stream.
And how are we to strip this living reality of belief? The answer is silence, but inner silence is just part of the story. We have to stop having it both ways. We truly need to question
every belief that we would
like to believe is true. Belief is a fundamental dis-trust to life as it is. Why?
Because life will violate every belief we hold as true. It is the Fear-Self that must hold onto its beliefs even when Life shows, time and again, that they are a pure consequence of our internal fears - our deficient self. But if you really see - you will see that everything is along for the ride. It’s a ride of a lifetime.
Download Post: Awareness
Tags: seeing
