The Burden You Need Not Carry

How the Simple Recognition of Being Lifts the Weight of Everyday Life

Beneath everything you think, feel and do runs one continuous experience: the simple fact of being. This essay traces that experience from its most ordinary expression, the feeling of being yourself, to the recognition that lifts the weight of the mind, the body and the world from your shoulders.

---

The Simple Fact of Being

See that just being is your primary, most intimate, fundamental experience. Everything else that you experience – thoughts, images, feelings, sensations, perceptions and so on – come after the experience of being. Before any of these experiences arise, you are present to know them.

Your being is prior to and independent of the content of your experience. You are not always thinking, but you always are. You are not always lonely, but you always are. You are not always tired or hungry, but you always are. You are not always 22 or 47 or 63 years old, but you always are. Whatever you may be experiencing at any moment, you always are.

What are you always? Just being, aware being. Nothing special, nothing mystical, nothing enlightened – just the simple, ordinary, intimate fact of being, prior to and independent of any particular experience.

All the great religious and spiritual traditions, one way or another, more or less directly, point you back to your being. This is the being you always and already are, prior to any meditation, practice or improvement of the condition of your mind or body, although it is usually overlooked due to the exclusive focus of your attention on the content of experience.

It is not necessary to change or get rid of any experience. All that is required is a softening of the focus of your attention from the content of experience, and a coming back to your self, that is, coming back to your being and simply resting in and as that.

This self-resting need not even be referred to as meditation or prayer. Meditation and prayer are usually considered activities that you do. Your being is what you are, prior to and independent of all doing. It remains itself whether it is recognised or overlooked. It needs no effort to maintain it. It is your natural condition.

Your body may be in pain, your mind may be agitated, your heart may be heavy, the world may be in turmoil. And your being is always at peace, full, lacking nothing.

Putting Down the Burden

You always feel that you are yourself. Your sense of being yourself pervades your entire experience throughout the day. Where does this feeling of being yourself come from? It can only come from something that is constantly with you. Every element of your experience – thoughts, feelings, sensations and perceptions – is constantly appearing, changing and disappearing. The feeling of being yourself is the constant factor in all changing experience. It comes from your being.

Consider an actor, John Smith, who plays the part of King Lear. When King Lear is on stage, he always feels that he is himself. Everything he experiences – his relationship with his family, his role as King of England, the war with France – is accompanied by the feeling of being himself. Where does King Lear get that feeling from? Who is the self of King Lear? It is John Smith. King Lear derives his sense of himself from John Smith. He then adds qualities to it: relationships, activities, feelings and so on.

It is exactly the same with you. From where do you derive the experience of always being yourself? From your being.

You then allow your sense of being to become mixed with, and therefore qualified by, the content of experience: thoughts, feelings, activities, relationships and so on. You express the pure, ordinary, intimate, familiar experience of being when you say ‘I am’. When you allow it to become mixed with the content of experience, the I am becomes ‘I am thinking’, ‘I am lonely’, ‘I am excited’, and so on.

But the pure I am is always with you. You always feel it. In fact, it is not with you, and it is not something you feel. It is what you are. It pervades the entirety of your experience. Indeed, everything you say about yourself contains the I am. I am a man. I am a woman. I am depressed. I am lonely. I am sad.

The experience to which you refer when you say simply ‘I am’ is the golden thread of being. I am not referring to some extraordinary, mystical, enlightened being to which some people have privileged access or of which they have special knowledge. I am referring to the ordinary, intimate feeling of being that pervades your experience now, as it is in itself, before it is mixed with the content of experience.

You cannot become that, nor can you cease being that. You may recognise it, and you may ignore it. But either way, you are always essentially that.

When the recognition ‘I am John Smith’ takes place in King Lear, King Lear is relieved of an immense burden, a burden he has been carrying around with him all his life.

It is exactly the same with you. When you recognise your being and its innate peace, you are relieved of an immense burden. You don’t cease relating with the mind, the body, the world and the demands of everyday life, but their heaviness leaves you. There is peace, lightness and a feeling of sufficiency.

---

Whatever the world is carrying right now, your being carries none of it. If you would like to explore that recognition directly, Living in Peace, Living as Peace is an invitation to put down the weight, and discover what remains.

---