The Simple Fact of Being (Part Two)
The Four Steps
Most of us spend our lives looking for happiness in the world, without quite knowing where it is to be found. This essay traces the inward journey from that search to its resolution; from the restless seeking of the separate self to the recognition of the infinite being that we always already are and its inherent peace.
There is something you have always been looking for. A sense of wholeness. Of being utterly at home. Of being, simply and completely, yourself.
You have touched it, everyone has, in a moment of unexpected stillness, in laughter with someone you love, in the sight of something so beautiful it stopped your thinking. In those moments, something settled. Everything felt right. And then, as quickly as it came, it seemed to pass.
The Search That Cannot Succeed
Most of us spend years, sometimes decades, believing that the cause of this happiness lives somewhere out in the world. That the right circumstance, the right person, the right achievement will finally deliver it and let it stay.
And there is a truth buried here. Whenever you do acquire or achieve something you have longed for, the seeking mind comes briefly to rest. And in that pause, happiness, which was always there in the background but obscured by the seeking mind, is revealed. The happiness was not caused by the object or the relationship. They simply brought the seeking to an end, and in that ending, what was always already present became visible.
Of course, the mind wrongly attributes this happiness to the object acquired, and so you set out again on another cycle of seeking, acquisition and fleeting satisfaction. But at some point you notice a pattern. Whatever it is that seemed to bring happiness, the happiness itself was always the same. It was not coming from out there. It was rising from within. And with that noticing, however faint at first, you sense that what you have been chasing through the world in fact lives in your own being.
This is where the inward journey begins.
Separating the Essential from the Passing
The first movement of this journey is one of disentangling – learning to tell the difference between what you essentially are and what merely passes through you.
You have thoughts, but you are not your thoughts. You are the one who knows them. You have feelings, but you are not your feelings. You are the one who is aware of them. You have a body, but you are not your body. You are the one who feels it.
This is something you can verify right now, in your own experience. Whatever you are aware of – a sound, a sensation, a thought arising and passing – you are already prior to it. The awareness which knows it stands behind all appearances, untouched by any of them.
Tracing your way back through layer after layer of experience, you arrive at a recognition: I am the knower of the known. I am the one who is aware.
This is not yet what has traditionally been called awakening. But it is a genuine turning point. It brings a real and immediate relief, a loosening of the grip that the passing content of experience has always seemed to have on you. It is a first taste of the peace that is your own nature.
The Witness Turns Around
Standing as the witness of your experience changes something fundamental in you. Previously, you were completely absorbed in your thoughts and feelings, carried along by them, identified with them. Now you recognise that you are the one who knows them. I am not my thoughts and feelings; I am that which is aware of them. You step back, and in that stepping back, the grip of experience loosens. A real relief arises, because you are no longer at the mercy of whatever happens to be passing through you.
But the witness still implies a relationship, a subject looking at objects, even if those objects are thoughts and feelings rather than things in the world. There is still a subtle separation between the one who watches and the thing being watched.
Some spiritual traditions invite you to rest here, and there is real value in this. You are encouraged to remain as the witness of your experience, watching your thoughts as they arise and pass, watching the way you eat, the way you walk, the way you breathe. This is a genuine and valuable practice. It brings steadiness, perspective, a certain inner spaciousness.
And yet, at some point, a deeper curiosity may stir. Having recognised yourself as the witness of experience, you find yourself drawn inward towards the witness itself, towards the very source of the knowing. You want to know the nature of the knower. So rather than being aware of your thoughts, your feelings, your actions, you turn around, so to speak, and become aware of being aware.
Witnessing experience, there is always something seen and someone seeing, always a subject and an object. But when awareness turns towards its own nature, something different happens. The one who is aware and what it is aware of are no longer two different things. Awareness and its object are the same. The subject and the object of knowing are one and the same knowing.
Being aware of being aware is, in this sense, a unique experience. It is the only experience in which the knower and the known are not two separate things. In every other experience, there is a subject here and an object there. But in being aware of being aware, that distance collapses entirely. There is only the knowing of itself.
Consider the sun and the moon. The sun illuminates the moon; there is the illuminator and the illuminated, the source and its object. But when the sun turns towards itself, there is simply the sun, simply the shining. The distinction between illuminator and illuminated dissolves in the light itself.
Self-Enquiry and Self-Resting
This relaxing of attention in its own source is what is sometimes called self-enquiry. We might say to the sun, accustomed as it is to shining its light on the moon: turn around, shine your light on yourself instead. Pay attention to yourself, the source of your light. But this instruction is really just a concession to the sun’s old habit of outward shining. In reality, the sun is too close to itself to shine its light on itself as though on a separate object.
And in the same way, you cannot really pay attention to yourself. You are too close to yourself for that. The attempt to attend to awareness as though it were something to be found dissolves naturally into simply being, simply being what you already are.
In this way, self-enquiry, this initial turning of attention towards its own source, very quickly gives way to self-abidance; to resting as being itself.
And so the whole movement unfolds. First, you are lost in experience, carried along by its current. Then you step back and know yourself as the witness, the one who is aware. Then the witness turns towards itself and the subject-object relationship begins to loosen. And finally, that loosening is complete; the distinction between the knower and the known falls away, and what remains is simply being, awake to itself.
Each step requires less doing than the one before. Being lost in experience is exhausting. Witnessing experience requires a small effort to disentangle yourself. Witnessing the witness requires less still. And resting as being, as what you already and always are, requires nothing at all.
The Endless Step
And then there is a final step, though it is less a step than an opening without end.
As you rest more and more deeply in being, you sink more and more deeply into yourself. And as you do, your being sheds the qualities it seemed to have borrowed from experience; its sense of limitation, its sense of being located here, in this body, in this life. These were never truly its own. And as they fall away, being is revealed in its own nature, wider and wider, without boundary or edge.
As Rumi says, ‘Flow down and down in always widening rings of being.’1
At first, being seems to pervade all things, to fill them from within. But gradually even this understanding deepens. Being does not pervade things as water pervades a sponge. It is being itself that appears as things. Everything and everyone derives their existence from the one being. The being that you essentially are is the being that everything essentially is.
From the outside, from the perspective of a person moving through the world, there is multiplicity, difference, separation. But at the level of being, there is only one. Infinite, indivisible, whole, complete; only appearing as many from the vantage point of a finite mind, but never actually becoming other than itself.
And this is what you know, in your deepest experience, as love. As beauty. The moments in which love arises most fully are the moments in which the boundaries between self and other grow thin. In those moments you are not merely feeling warmly towards another person.
You are tasting something deeper; the felt recognition that you and the other share the same being, that at the level of what you most essentially are, there is no separation. Love is the experience of the unity of being, recognised from within. This is why it feels like the truest thing. Because it is the nature of reality itself, briefly and beautifully known.
Only That
In this last and endless step, people and things are progressively outshone by the infinite being in which they appear, until there is only that. The separate self is not destroyed; it is expanded, slowly relieved of every boundary and limitation, until what it always was stands fully revealed: unlimited being, infinite and undivided, the one being from which it was never truly apart. What began as your awakening to being becomes being’s re-awakening to itself, in you, as you.
At the beginning of the journey, you lost yourself in experience. At the end, experience loses itself in you; not in you as a person, but in you as the one infinite being. Just as experience once seemed to absorb you entirely, being now absorbs everything into itself, turns everything into itself, reveals itself as the ground and substance of all that appears.
And after travelling this path many times, a question arises: Why do I keep beginning as a separate self and making my way towards the One? Why not simply begin as the One and remain there?
And what is found, in the end, is what was being sought from the very beginning. The peace and happiness you looked for in the world, and later sought through spiritual practice, were never elsewhere. They are the nature of the infinite being that you are. The search that began in the world and continued on the spiritual path comes, at last, to its natural end. There is nowhere left to go, nothing left to seek. The one who was searching has been revealed as the very thing they were searching for.
As Meister Eckhart said, ‘When you come to the One that gathers all things into itself, there you must stay.’2
Rumi, ‘A Community of the Spirit’, from The Essential Rumi, trans. Coleman Barks with John Moyne (HarperSanFrancisco, 1995).
Meister Eckhart, in Meister Eckhart: A Modern Translation, trans. Raymond B. Blakney (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1941).
Rupert, how does one Thank you for the light you shine into our hearts and our minds and how you so sweetly and gently show us our way Home. I am on my knees in gratitude 🙏 A Million Thank You's!!!
True love.