Your True Home
A Meditation on Being
We often overlook the one experience that never changes – the simple feeling of being. This meditation is an invitation to return to that ever-present stillness, not by effort or discipline, but by recognising what has always been quietly shining beneath the flow of thoughts, feelings and perceptions.
Take a small step back from the content of experience until you come to the simplicity of simply being. Then rest in that, as that.
Simply being shines in you as the knowledge I am.
I am accompanies all experience, irrespective of its content. If I am tired, I am. If I am sitting on a chair, I am. If I am reading a meditation, I am. If I am thinking, I am. Whatever I am experiencing, I am. Even if I am deeply depressed, I am.
This quiet presence – I am – shines brightly in all experience.
In everyday life, experience obscures being. In meditation or prayer, being outshines experience.
For those with a religious disposition, this remembrance of being in the midst of experience is the practice of the presence of God.
Experience is always in motion; being is always at rest.
Live in being, as being – that is the place of peace.
At Home in the World
If you make your home in being, as being, then wherever you are in the world, you are at home. You are at peace in the midst of any experience you may face. It is your home without walls.
It is a peace that does not need to defend itself against, or turn away from, the content of experience. Any peace that does would be fragile – a state of mind among many other states of mind.
But the peace that is the nature of being is not a state of the mind; it is the nature of the mind. It is the peace that passeth understanding – the peace that has nothing to do with what is, or is not, taking place in experience.
All experience derives its very existence from being, just as a movie derives its existence, relatively speaking, from the screen. But being needs nothing from experience. It is free, unbound, unlimited.
Being is completely open to all experience. It intimately pervades all experience. It is utterly one with it.
No experience sticks to being. It remains always in the same pristine, luminous, free condition.
It is never modified, never tarnished, never hurt.
Utterly vulnerable and yet indestructible.
Always shining quietly in the background of experience, intimately pervading the foreground.
Remain as that. It is your home.
“Take a small step back from the content of experience until you come to the simplicity of simply being. Then rest in that, as that.” I…there’s the rub!