What You Are Before Experience Begins
On the Simple Fact of Being Aware
Before any thought arises, before any feeling takes shape, before any sound reaches you, you are already aware. This awareness is not something you do, achieve or maintain through effort. It is simply what you are, prior to everything else.
Just notice the entire content of your experience: your thoughts, the sensations of your body, any physical discomfort that may be present, whatever sounds are present around you. Just allow it to be exactly as it is. And notice that whatever you are experiencing appears in, and is known by, awareness.
It is not necessary to change your experience. No change in experience alters or affects the awareness with which it is known and within which it appears. Be aware not only of the content of your experience, but of the simple fact that you are aware.
Be aware of being aware. Normally, attention is so focused on the content of experience that the simple fact of being aware is overlooked.
But even when it is overlooked, awareness itself is always present. It is always shining in the background of experience, illuminating or knowing the entire content of experience.
What is the nature of the awareness with which your experience is known, and within which your experience appears?
Awareness has a luminous quality. In the same way that the sun illuminates the earth with a physical light, awareness illuminates experience with a knowing light, a light of pure knowing. Awareness also has a spacious quality, a space-like quality, in the sense that it contains or holds all experience within it.
And this is what you essentially are before any thought, emotion, sensation or perception arises, this luminous, spacious presence. You do not need to do anything to become this. All that is necessary is to recognise that this is what you already essentially are. No manipulation of experience will make you more or less this presence of awareness. Nothing you do or cease doing with your mind will affect what you essentially are, in the same way that nothing a character in a film either does or ceases doing affects the screen.
This luminous, spacious presence of awareness does not share the qualities or characteristics of your experience. Your thoughts may be agitated, but the awareness within which they appear is not itself agitated. It is inherently peaceful, a peace not derived from the content of experience.
The presence of awareness does not share any sense of sorrow or lack that may be present in your experience. In awareness itself, there is no boredom or restlessness, no sense of what next, no sense that anything needs to be added. Awareness is already full, already sufficient in itself.
Whatever turbulence the world outside may carry, the awareness that you are carries none of it. If you would like to explore that recognition directly, Living in Peace, Living as Peace is an invitation to discover, and return to, the peace that is already here.
That everything known - taste, touch, thought, etc., is appearing within awareness, which is no-thing? Hadn’t really grokked that concept before. And of course, my body mind system can’t really grok it anyway because of that one little thing…that is no-thing 😉
Thank you brother! I have read, the clarity of this simple understanding and I experience with the senses… knowing “aware of being aware” it’s experienced fresh when I relax into this spacious grace.