Awareness: The Sun, the Sky and the Ocean

How Awareness Illuminates, Contains and Gives Rise to All Experience

Devon, 30 November 2025 – photo: Rupert Spira

The simple fact of being aware is so intimate and familiar that it is rarely noticed. This exploration invites you to look at that simple, ever-present experience and to consider its nature directly, without reference to the passing content of the mind.

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The Fundamental Fact Of Being Aware

The fact of being aware or awareness itself is the most fundamental aspect of experience.

Nothing that you are aware of is fundamental to experience. Anything that begins, lasts for a while and disappears cannot be fundamental. It is, by definition, temporary.

Everything that you are aware of – thoughts, memories, feelings, sensations of your body, such as the tingling of your face, hands or feet, and your perceptions of the world – all of these appear, exist for a while and vanish. They are, as it were, added to you and then removed from you.

But there is one element of experience that remains consistently present throughout all changing experience. That is the fact of being aware or awareness itself.

Awareness is not a property of your body-mind. It’s not a property that a person has. Everything that you know of yourself as a person consists of thoughts, images, feelings, sensations and perceptions. These are known by you. They are not what you are. They are what you know, what you experience.

Mistaken Identity and Its Consequences

We normally mistakenly believe that being a person, or being a body is our fundamental experience. It is not. Being aware is our fundamental experience. The sensations and perceptions that constitute our experience of the body appear to us and disappear in us, awareness.

If the awareness that you essentially are were to describe its experience of itself, it would never say, ‘I am a body’, ‘I am a mind’, ‘I am a thought’ or ‘I am an emotion’. These are what awareness knows, not what awareness is. If awareness were to say what it is, it would simply say, ‘I am’.

The words ‘I am’ signify what you truly are. But most people allow the ‘I am’ – that is, the fact of being aware or awareness itself – to become mixed up with, and as a result, seemingly qualified by the content of experience: thoughts, feelings, sensations and perceptions. The ‘I am’ becomes ‘I am a body’, ‘I am a mind’, ‘I am a person’, ‘I am a man’, ‘I am a woman’, ‘I am 22’, ‘I am 47’ and so on.

It is this mistaken identity that is the cause of all our sorrow and conflict. The resolution of our sorrow and conflict is to see clearly what I am – to see clearly what you are before you are mixed with and qualified by experience.

Thoughts, feelings, memories, sensations and perceptions change innumerable times every day. They are added to you, last briefly, and are then removed from you. They cannot possibly be what you essentially are.

You have been your self your entire life; therefore your self must be that which has remained with you your entire life. You say, ‘I dreamt last night. I slept deeply last night. I went for a walk yesterday. I went on holiday last year. I got married 10 years ago. I went to school 30 years ago’ and so on. Always I, I, I. The ‘I’ is the golden thread that runs through your experience.

‘I’, the golden thread of being aware or awareness itself, is the only element of experience that remains continuously present throughout the three states of waking, dreaming and sleeping, and throughout the entirety of your life. Therefore, only awareness itself qualifies as your self.

Being Your Self Knowingly

You have allowed yourself to become entangled in the content of experience, and as a result, instead of saying, ‘I feel sad’, you say, ‘I am sad’. Instead of saying, ‘I feel loneliness’, you say, ‘I am lonely’. You cannot be what you know, and you cannot know objectively what you are.

Meditation or prayer is not something that you do or cease doing with your mind. It has nothing to do with the content of your mind. It has nothing to do with manipulating thoughts, feelings, sensations or perceptions.

Meditation or prayer is what you are. It is just being yourself knowingly. I say ‘knowingly’, because everyone is their self all the time whether they know it or not, although most people do not know their self clearly, because they have allowed their self to be mixed with the content of experience.

Meditation is just being as you are knowingly – not becoming that, not making an effort to be that, but simply being what you already are.

Your being is freely given to you. You do not have to work hard to be, or to be aware. Being aware is your natural condition. It is the only aspect of yourself that requires no effort.

Meditation or prayer is simply to be that, to abide as that. It is not a new experience. Indeed, it is not an experience at all.

Awareness as the Field of All Experience

If you go deeply into the experience of being aware or awareness itself, you see that you, awareness, are not only that which knows or illuminates experience, but also the medium or field within which all experience arises.

Your thoughts and feelings, the sensations that constitute the experience of your body (the tingling of your face, hands or feet), and your perceptions of the world (the sight of these words, the sounds around you) – all appear within the field of awareness.

Awareness is not just luminous, it is spacious – the container of all experience, the medium within which all experience arises, exists and into which every experience vanishes when it disappears.

As the knower or witness of your experience, you could liken awareness to the sun. Just as the sun illuminates all objects on earth, so awareness knows or illuminates the entire content of experience.

As the medium within which all experience arises, you could liken consciousness to space or the sky, and the entire content of experience to the birds and clouds that pass through it.

The Water of Awareness

And lastly, awareness is not only that which knows your experience, nor only that within which all experience arises. It is that from which all experience is made. It is the substance or reality of all experience. As such, it could be likened to an ocean of which all the ripples, waves and currents of experience are modulations.

You, awareness, are the knower of all experience. You are the medium within which all experience arises, and you are the substance of which all experience is made.

You are the water of awareness, whose modulations are the ripples, waves and currents of experience.

The ripples, waves and currents are numerous, but the water is one. It is never divided by the forms that it assumes. The forms do not exist independently of the ocean. They are not things in themselves. You cannot pluck a wave out of the ocean. Likewise, you cannot take a thought, or indeed any experience, out of awareness. There is nowhere outside awareness.

Everything you experience is a modulation of awareness itself. But awareness itself is never modulated by any of the temporary forms that it assumes, just as the water is never changed by the ripples, waves or currents.

Awareness is always the same; it is unchanging. The awareness with which you knew your experience as a five-year-old child is identical to the awareness with which you know your current experience.

Awareness modulates itself in all the forms of experience but is never itself modulated by any experience. Awareness is never changed or moved, never tarnished or aged, never hurt or modified by experience.

You, awareness, modify yourself in all the forms of experience without ever ceasing to be yourself.

The Nature of Your Being Is Happiness Itself

Knowing that you are the unchanging presence of awareness that underlies and pervades all experience is in itself incomplete. One more thing remains to be known, and that is that the nature of awareness is peace or happiness.

It is this recognition that puts an end to the great search – the existential longing for which you seek relief in objects, substances, activities, relationships, and later in teachings, teachers, traditions and methods and so on.

This is the great recognition that everyone should know, indeed that everyone should be told from an early age: the nature of your being is happiness itself.

If happiness were caused by an object, an activity, a substance or a relationship, then the objects and relationships that once seemed to provide happiness would still provide it now. The toys that seemed to make you happy as a young child would still be a source of happiness now. But they are soon discarded. After a while, they lose their capacity to provide happiness.

Likewise, we would all be happily married and live happily ever after with our first love – the person who seemed to produce happiness for us when we were young. But this is obviously not the case for all of us.

The happiness you experienced on receiving a toy as a young child, or winning a game, or passing an exam – indeed all the instances of happiness throughout life – have always been the same experience. There is not a different kind of happiness associated with different kinds of experience. Happiness is always the same happiness. Why? Because your being is always the same being, and happiness is the taste of your being.

Why do you believe that happiness is produced by objects, substances, relationships and so on? It is because the seeking mind that veiled your innate happiness comes briefly to an end on the acquisition of the object, and as a result your true nature shines.

When the mind rises again, you wrongly attribute the happiness you previously felt to the object or relationship that preceded it and seemed to precipitate it, and you go out in search of it again.

In this way, you spend much of your life in pursuit of happiness through objects, substances, activities and relationships – at first in the familiar experiences of daily life, and later in more refined forms such as teachings, methods, practices and teachers. But this is merely a subtler version of the same outward search. It is simply a more subtle form of the same outward search.

The sensitive person notices that whenever a desire is fulfilled, the seeking mind comes briefly to an end and happiness is revealed. It is always the same experience, and it cannot be attributed to the object that seemed to precede it.

In the gap between two seeking thoughts, our own being shines, and happiness is the taste of that shining.

This recognition alone should be sufficient to bring the search for happiness in the world, or in any spiritual practice, tradition or teacher to an end.

This is the great recognition that everyone should know: ‘I am awareness and happiness is my nature. That is all.’

This recognition brings an end to the existential longing that lies beneath almost everything you think, feel and do. It brings an end to loneliness, the fear of death, and the agitation of anxiety and sorrow.

Living from the Fullness of Your Being

You do not cease engaging in activities and relationships, but your activities and relationships come from the fullness of your being, from your peace and joy. They are no longer seen as a means of obtaining it.

This recognition frees your relationships and friendships from the impossible burden of providing happiness for you. Instead, they become a sharing, a celebrating, an expressing of your innate happiness.

It frees your activities, your vocation in life, to become a vehicle through which this understanding is communicated and shared with humanity, rather than a means of simply serving the self you previously believed yourself to be. You become a giver, not a taker.

Everyone, without exception, has frequent and numerous tastes of their true nature throughout the day. The pause between two thoughts or perceptions, the fulfilment of a desire, a moment of tremendous sorrow or grief, a moment of astonishment or surprise, a pleasurable sensation, the experience of deep sleep – these are all natural, unsolicited pauses in the flow of experience, the cracks in the flow of experience where the peace of our true nature briefly shines, only to be eclipsed again by the content of experience.

Most people miss the import of these brief tastes of their true nature for lack of the proper interpretation, and therefore they miss the opportunity that these gaps in the flow of experience afford.

Here, we take advantage of these free gifts of our true nature. We cultivate them. We frequently interpose brief pauses in the flow of experience and taste the peace of our true nature, until in time the fact of being or being aware is not something we merely visit or experience from time to time. We come to live there. We make it our home, not just something we turn to between other experiences. We become established in the peace of our true nature.

If you’ve understood this, as I’m sure you have, that is really all you need to know. All that remains is to lead a life, to the best of your ability, that is consistent with this understanding, and to express it in your own way, in your life, with your family, with your friends and in your community. That’s all.

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