The Great Recognition

What You Are Before You Are Anything

Image by Tyler Lastovich

If we were to distil the essential understanding of all the great religious and spiritual traditions over the last three thousand years into a single sentence, it might read like this:

Peace and happiness are the nature of your being, and you share your being with everyone and everything.

In other words, behind the apparent multiplicity and diversity of the universe lies a single, unchanging and ever-present reality. Like innumerable waves and currents arising from the ocean, existing within it and vanishing back into it, so all phenomena – whether physical or mental – arise from this one source, exist within it and merge back into it.

This one reality cannot legitimately be named but is provisionally referred to in numerous ways: being, consciousness, awareness, presence, the absolute, the self, the divine.

The Veil of Perception

How might you know or apprehend this one reality?

When you approach it through your senses, it appears in a way that is consistent with their limitations. Just as a person who wears orange-tinted glasses will see orange snow, so when you look at the one underlying reality through your perceiving faculties, you see it in a way that is consistent with their limitations.

In other words, when you experience this one reality through seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling, it appears as sights, sounds, tastes, textures and smells. That is, the one reality appears as the world. The one reality appears as this book in your hands, as your legs on the chair and as the universe that appears to surround you. These are all waves, or vibrations, of the great ocean of consciousness.

Nor can this reality be apprehended by thought. Just as sense perception refracts reality into a multiplicity of things, thought names each of these apparent things. ‘Book’, ‘chair’, ‘universe’ – these are names that thought gives to the apparent multiplicity of things. By naming forms as such, thought further substantiates the belief that each of these things exists as a separate entity in its own right.

Thus, the mind – the faculty of thinking and perceiving – creates the illusion of the world. It confers names and forms on the one underlying reality. But behind this illusion, and expressing itself as this illusion, is the one reality.

Being empty, the one reality is inherently peaceful. Being full of itself alone, the one reality is unconditionally fulfilled. Being infinite, the one reality is infinitely creative. Being eternal, the one reality was never born and will never die.

And you are that. This is the great recognition.

The one reality that you essentially are has no name or form but gives rise to all names and forms. It cannot be known by thought or apprehended by the senses but is that from which all thought and perception arise. It cannot, as such, be known by the mind, but is never not known.

As the reality of all that exists, it is the reality of your self. It is what you are.

The Eternal Return

You are the one that has given rise to the entire universe. But in order to perceive yourself as such, you had to forget your self. You had to overlook your formless nature and squeeze yourself into the frame of a finite mind, through whose perceiving faculties you know yourself as the universe. You did this out of your own freedom, thereby enabling you to experience the potential that lies within you in form. You are the infinite, appearing as the finite when viewed through the narrow lens of sense perception.

But you have paid the price. In order to realise your infinite potential, you had to step out of eternity into time. You had to relinquish your infinite nature and consent to becoming a finite being. You forgot your self; you overlooked your self; you fell asleep within your own dream. And now you experience all the lack, fear, sorrow, separation and conflict that inevitably attend this amnesia.

However, as the one infinite reality, you have left traces of yourself everywhere in your own creation. Experience is sprinkled everywhere with your presence. You are continually seeking to awaken yourself to your self.

The smile of a friend. The scent of a rose. The pause between thoughts. A moment of understanding. The sun on the hills. A moment of amazement. The fulfilment of a desire. A broken heart. The stillness of the night. The immensity of grief.

You, the one reality, continually burst through the veil of separation, gently drawing yourself back to your self.

When the sun is concealed, darkness appears. When the sun is revealed, light shines. Likewise, you are continually concealing your self and revealing your self, forgetting your self and remembering your self. Thus, you experience alternating states of sorrow and joy, agitation and peace, conflict and harmony, separation and love.

Every time you experience sorrow, agitation, grief, loneliness and conflict you have veiled your self with yourself. It is for this reason that a great yearning lies in the hearts of all people. A yearning to be divested of their limitations and returned to their true nature.

Every time you experience joy, peace, love and beauty, you are tasting yourself as you truly are, divested of the limitation that thought and perception confer on you. As such, joy, peace, love and beauty are interventions of the one reality into the multiplicity and diversity of the world.

They are the shining of being.

And you are that.

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