Everybody knows the experience of love, and everyone values it above all else. It is in this experience that the very nature of reality breaks through the veil of perception, giving us a taste of the prior unity that everyone and everything shares.
This week we’re exploring from the middle of page 175 through to the section break on page 178,* tracing how love reveals a shared being and how a simple enquiry uncovers the same ground directly.
(*The page numbers indicated here each week refer to the original publication of the physical book – they may vary slightly from more recent versions, owing to the publisher’s design modifications.)
The Shining of Being
Before you experience anything, you experience simply being, and you express this by saying, ‘I am’. The reason you can say ‘I am’ is that you know the experience of being. Implicit in the statement ‘I am’ is the statement ‘I know that I am’.
And the self that you are and the self that knows that you are are one and the same self. There are not two selves in you; you are one self that both is and knows. Aware being is what you most fundamentally are. In other words, your being is self-aware. Just as the sun illuminates itself, so your being knows itself.
The awareness of being is the only experience there is that does not take place in subject-object relationship. That is, it is not mediated through thought or perception. If you go directly to the experience of being, and do not allow it to be qualified or conditioned by experience – by thouhgts, memories, feelings, sensations, activities or relationships – you will find no limits there, for there is nothing in it, prior to the arising of experience, with which it could be divided. Unlimited being, infinite being; in religious language, God’s being.
So the knowledge ‘I am’ is the shining of infinite, indivisible being in yourself, as yourself. The same being shines everyone, as their very own self.
