The Quiet Fact of Being

An Invitation to Notice What Is Always Present Beneath Experience

There is an aspect of your experience that is always present, whatever else may come or go. It does not need to be created or achieved. It is not the result of effort or belief. It is simply the quiet fact of being. This essay invites you to turn towards that ever-present background – not as an idea or a theory, but as the most intimate truth of your experience.

---

Notice that the experience of being accompanies and pervades all experience, irrespective of its content.

The experience of simply being is what you refer to when you say ‘I am’. And everybody can say from experience, ‘I am’. The reason everyone can say ‘I am’ is because everyone has the experience of being.

There is nothing extraordinary or spiritual about the experience of being. Being is the most obvious, intimate and familiar experience there is – so obvious, so intimate, so familiar that we almost always overlook it.

The Transparency of Being

If I were to ask you now to become aware of your breathing, you would suddenly notice it. In fact, you were already aware of it, but your breathing was so quiet, so familiar, so close, that you overlooked it in favour of the more colourful, dramatic, or engaging elements of experience – a rush of thoughts about your day, the pull of an emotion, the warmth of the sun on your skin, or the sound of a passing car. As a result, the ordinary, familiar, intimate, almost transparent experience of breathing receded into the background. You ceased to notice it.

Being is like that but even more intimate, more familiar, more ordinary, more transparent. It lies, so to speak, behind even your breathing. And like your breathing, being is so quiet, so subtle, that it is almost always eclipsed by the brighter, more attention-grabbing content of experience.

In everyday life, your attention is caught by a stream of thoughts, passing moods, physical sensations, and the sights and sounds around you. As a result, your being fades into the background and is overlooked.

In meditation or prayer, you simply bring being into the foreground. Rather than focussing only on what’s happening – your thoughts, feelings, sensations or surroundings – and overlooking the quiet sense of being itself, you allow your attention to relax away from all that content and rest instead in the simple experience of being.

The Screen and the Movie

It’s like two people watching a movie: one is absorbed in the story, the other notices the screen. They’re both looking at the same thing, but each is emphasising a different aspect of the experience. One allows the movie to veil the screen; the other allows the screen to shine through the movie.

In just the same way, some of us let our thoughts, feelings, sensations and perceptions obscure our being. Others allow being to shine through the layers of experience, through the drama of life.

The one caught up in the movie suffers or enjoys depending on how the story unfolds. The one who sees the screen is at peace, whatever the story contains. If you’re entirely absorbed in the drama of experience, you suffer or enjoy accordingly. But if you remain in touch with being throughout experience, you are always at peace.

And just as you don’t need to look away from the movie to notice the screen, you don’t need to turn away from experience to remain in touch with being. It takes only the smallest shift in attention, but that subtle shift is the difference between sorrow and peace.

The Constant ‘I Am’

When you say, ‘I am lonely’ or ‘I am anxious’, the ‘I am’ is present. When you say, ‘I am depressed’ or ‘I am upset’, the ‘I am’ is present. When you say, ‘I am married’ or ‘I am single’, ‘I am’ is still there. When you say, ‘I am healthy’ or ‘I am sick’, the same ‘I am’ remains.

Being shines in the midst of all experience. In fact, you could say that all experience is a colouring of being, just as the movie is a colouring of the screen. Countless colours, yet always the same colourless screen; countless experiences, yet always the same transparent, silent, peaceful being.

And just as changing the movie has no effect on the nature of the screen, so the changing content of experience has no effect on your essential being. Being remains in its own peaceful, luminous, unchanging condition. You cannot even say it is ‘your’ being. Being does not belong to you as a person. You, as a person, belong to being.

The quiet knowledge ‘I am’ shines steadily, whatever the circumstances. When stripped of the qualities it temporarily seems to acquire from thoughts, feelings and sensations, being reveals itself as open, undivided, ever-present and deeply peaceful. It is not something you possess; it is what you are.

---