Non-dual awareness is the essence of awakening or enlightenment.
By definition, non-dual awareness is not something that comes and goes or needs to be evoked or otherwise made to appear.
Non-dual awareness is your regular ordinary everyday awareness. That already is your true nature.
But a lot of people seem to struggle with recognizing it. One of the reasons is that we’re usually seeking something new and different than what is already here. We lose ourselves in concepts, in the search for a different experience.
Back up!
The point is to see this regular ordinary everyday awareness for what it really is — everything. It is the world and your experience of the world, not as two separate things but as the same “thing,” one whole, and that is what you are.
You don’t need a new special state of consciousness you only need to recognize the specialness of ordinary awareness that is present as the backdrop of every state of consciousness.
You won’t find it by searching for it. But you can train your mind to notice it. And you can notice it at every moment in every situation.
It’s staring at you in the form of a human, a puppy, and a coffee mug.
In a way it’s about learning to use your mind differently, to turn it back on itself — Awareness of awareness.
But awareness can’t concieve itself because awareness is inconceivable. Awareness is your immediate experience before you conceive it. Your immediate experience is change (also called Tao). But once change is conceived, change has become difference.
For awareness to understand itself it has to understand the inconceivable change it is.
As long as you conceive yourself, you fail to understand yourself.
You can’t muscle your way into understanding; it needs to be given.
When you learn where or rather how to look, you can easily recognize it. You have to notice it just once. It’s the root sense of knowing, feeling, and perceiving.
Whenever you feel happy or sad, proud or ashamed, warm or cold, even without thinking about it, you know that you have these feelings.
Even when you’re not continuously thinking about how sad you are, you know it. Simply said, you can’t be sad without knowing it.
You might object and say that sometimes you don’t know what you feel but then you know that. No way to escape it.
Another example:
Close your eyes right now (actually, after reading this paragraph). Now that your eyes are shut, how do you know you’re not in deep sleep?
You know because knowing is present.
Your true nature “precedes” all feelings and perceptions but is simultaneous because there is only one moment: now.
It “underlies” the feeling of knowing something but is not different from that something.
Actually, the truth doesn’t “precede” or “underlie” anything because it is the inseparable common denominator of everything. It is the knowing itself before it knows something.
It is here right now as the words you’re reading on the screen.
What is the one thing that has always been with you? Ever since you remember? What is it?
No need to overthink it. It’s way simpler than you think it is.
You might think you don’t get it but you can see it even while not getting it.
You might be looking for something fixed or permanent. You might be trying to look past all the fleeting change to find the unchanging reality. The fleeting change is the unchanging reality.
If you change change it’s still change.
Your true nature is the always-changing inconceivable instantaneous experience before you take any hold of it.
Bad feelings turn into good ones, pain into relief, hate into love, resistance into acceptance. Where is the permanence (or impermanence, for that matter)?
Whatever you’re looking for. Stop. Don’t look for anything. What is it that is looking?
You already get it. You see it. You feel it. You are it.
Can it be that simple? It is. But that’s exactly what’s so hard to accept for the mind. There is tremendous resistance to the truth.
Don’t expect bright light or an angel ceremony coming down from the clouds. The common reaction is more like, “Oh that! Ha! Of course!”
And when you’ve seen it once then it’s only a matter of seeing it everywhere in everything all the time.
Luka
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I could feel the resistance of the ego while reading this one… thinking “wait, I don’t get it” “why is this so hard to understand?” and then the letting go of the needing to understand because it is already known.
Thanks for this.