You Never Go Anywhere
On Travel, the Placeless Here, and the Peace That Never Came from Anywhere (The Nature of Consciousness #39)
Awareness never moves. The world streams through it – sights, sounds, sensations, journeys, years – and not one of these passages leaves a mark on what they pass through. Beneath every experience, beneath every change of scene and every change of heart, something remains as it always was: the silent, placeless ground in which all movement takes place.
This week, we’re exploring from the section break on page 160 through to the section break on page 162.* The investigation moves from the timeless ‘now’ – explored in recent weeks – to the spaceless ‘here’, discovering in the simple fact that we love to travel a quietly radical confirmation of what never moves.
(*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.)
You Never Go Anywhere
Before any thought or perception arises, there is simply the fact of being aware, of awareness itself. This is what you are at the deepest level.
In the absence of thought, there is no experience of time, because time is only known, or imagined, through thinking. In the absence of perception, there is no experience of space, because space is only experienced through the senses. Awareness itself is prior to thought and perception. And in their absence, there is no experience of time and space. Awareness is not extended in any dimension.
When awareness rises in the form of perception, it throws a boundary around itself, seeming to localise itself in space, as a circle drawn on a sheet of white paper seems to localise a portion of the paper within itself. The paper inside the circle has not changed; it is the same paper throughout. But the circle creates the appearance of an inside, a bounded region that seems separate from the rest. Perception works in this way. It creates the illusion of an inside self, behind the eyes, and an outside world.
