Being Aware of Being Aware and Our Fundamental Resilience

You are never not aware, and in this, lies the truth of your Being. 

You are always witnessing your experience.  You are always knowing your experience.  This awareness, is always present in your experience.  You, the knower, the witness, is never not there.  

We spend our lives so fascinated with the content of experience that we miss the most fundamental element of it:  the knowing of it.  This is a part of us that is worth exploring, and is infinitely more interesting than any thought, feeling or perception.  

How is this practical?  Why do we care?  Because when we become familiar enough with this "knowing awareness"  we discover our resilience, our indestructibility, and our fundamental ok-ness.  

This awareness that we are, enters, endures and emerges from all experience unscathed and at peace.   

We are more powerful and resilient than any thought about ourselves can encapsulate.  This can be felt/known, RIGHT NOW.

When we stand as “witnessing consciousness” we enjoy the peace of the dispassionate observer. This is the peaceful knowing that all that arises, arises to you and in you.  This is your essence nature.  There is still duality, although it is a sweet duality.  It certainly beats believing/feeling oneself to be a helpless object.

It is then seen that there's no witness and we disappear into the movement of the play, we dissolve into the movie of life.  We see that there is no "me" and there is no "center".  This is the movement from dispassionate witness to a passionate participant, absent belief in the concept of division.  The illusion of time, and space and separateness is revealed.  The duality of witnessing consciousness gives way to nondual awareness. 

One can now see both dually and nondually.  We were given two eyes to see dually, and one eye, the third eye, to see non-dually.  This is “unity consciousness.”   

The movement from witnessing consciousness to unity consciousness is not “done” – rather, it is seen. It is a matter of clear seeing

Spiritual practice is, in part, designed to get the body-mind ready to be blown away.

Practice helps the aspirant to move across a spectrum of conceptual and perceptual frameworks  that will allow the body-mind to non-conceptually comprehend the experience of its vastness, and to make it through the fire of transformation.  

Ultimately, no framework can hold the truth of ones being. As one has glimpses of Reality, the body-mind needs to be able to frame it, and hold it.  The mind is the slowest. It needs to catch up until it ultimately surrenders and rests in Peace. 

There is a certain element of grace in this, because the body-mind, as an object, cannot "do."  The paradox is:  until that grace arrives, one must "do" something with ones life, and if one is called to spiritual practice that is what you will be "doing."  Until grace steps in (although it is all grace), we are "preparing the house for the master" to arrive.

Our lives are something of a dream.  Until it's not.  We believe stories about ourselves.  Until we see that those stories have no foundation.  .

The true nature of Reality may come to you in temporary  "glimpses." For some moments, everything can look upside-down and inside-out.   An unfamiliar silence may arise in your perception.  The look of your body may appear strange.  One can experience an unusual and unexpected shift in perspective.  Then, there is a temporary shift back.

These glimpses can be disorienting.  They can be accompanied by fear or terror. It is no wonder.  These glimpses suggest that life is something of a fairy tale;  everything about it - time, space, the nature of matter.  The glimpses suggest that "you" do not exist in a way that was taken for granted as truth.  

They portend a Great Opening; a possible shift in identity.   It's happening... but it's happening in it's own timeframe.  You are opening into That; at just the right time, and at just the right pace.  

"Scrape away the wishing and the careful figuring.  What you most fear has already happened.  Your container is already broken." Baha' al-Din-e Valad

A thought exerts no control, holds no power, or actually points to something, from the standpoint of Awareness. There is no meaning to thought.  It is all "meaningless" but not in a negative way.  It is meaningless in a neutral, empty way.  A thought has no more power over you than the visual perception of a tree, or the auditory impression of a bird, or the physical sensation of an itch.  Thought, sensations, and perceptions are all "equal" from the standpoint of the Awareness that "knows" it; the I that I am.

Thinking is not a problem. Thoughts are not a problem.  The problem, if there is one, is in believing that an “I” thought is actually pointing to a distinct, and separate person; a separate consciousness.

The I thought, in all of its forms (I am hungry, I want this…) is not actually suggestive of a "someone" connected to it.  There is no-one connected to it.  There is only the knowing of it. 

There is nothing personal about your life.

Yep.  It's there.  

A teacher who implies that ones gender is an impediment to awakening, or conversely, an advantage, simply hasn't awakened.  It's a dead giveaway that they haven't realized their true nature.  

Awareness is our very nature, and awareness has no distinct quality, such as gender.  All beings can realize their true nature.  Full stop.  What we are is ever present and accessible to all at every moment.

Additionally,  while the non-dual scene offers diverse teachers, whatever institutional biases exist in the business world, exists in the spiritual marketplace.  It comes down to habit, engrained societal preferences, and software algorithms in the age ofsocial media.  It is not lost on me, as I write this, that most of the teachers I've studied with, are men.  But there are women out there, and I expect they will be given more opportunity to have their voice heard.