Nothing that has ever happened to you has ever hurt, damaged or diminished what you essentially are. Although your body may carry old injuries, and your mind may carry old griefs, the fact of simply being that underlies both remains exactly as it was before any of it happened.
Be aware of the simple fact of being that underlies and pervades all your experience.
Nothing special, nothing mysterious, nothing spiritual, simply the ordinary, intimate, familiar experience of being that underlies and pervades every experience you have. The fact of bieng aware is enshrined in common parlance, ‘I am attending a concert’, ‘I am eating lunch’, ‘I am feeling lonely or excited or anxious’, ‘I am twenty-two or forty-seven or sixty-three’, ‘I am English’, ‘I am French’, ‘I am married’, ‘I am single’. Always ‘I am’, temporarily qualified by a feeling, an age, an activity, a relationship and so on.
This pure ‘I am’ refers to the fact of simply being, who you are prior to experience. Nothing mystical or enlightened, simply your ordinary, intimate, familiar being, which is normally so thoroughly mixed up with the content of experience that you do not know it clearly.
All that is necessary is to see your being clearly, before it is mixed up with experience. It is like the screen before the movie starts, before it is coloured or qualified by the contents of the movie. Your being is like the screen before it is coloured or qualified by the content of experience.
So-called enlightenment or awakening is simply the recognition, the revelation, of the nature of your being, not how it might become if you meditate enough or study enough or purify your thoughts or feelings, just the recognition or the revelation of your being as it is now, as it always is, before it is mixed with experience.
So-called enlightenment or awakening is simply the recognition, the revelation, of the nature of your being, as it is now, as it always is, before it is mixed with experience.
Meditation is something you either do or cease doing with your mind, but you are simply being irrespective of what is or is not taking place in your mind. Meditation is valuable, but simply being is not meditating. It is just abiding as the being you essentially are. Or we could say that the highest form of meditation or prayer is to sink deeply into being.
As you sink deeply into being, you let go of the entire content of experience, and your being is divested of all the temporary qualities that it borrowed from the content of experience. As it does so, it loses its apparent limitations and is revealed as infinite being, God’s being, the only being there is.
Your being has never been scarred or stained by experience. No experience leaves a trace on your being, in the same way that no movie leaves a trace on the screen. The screen does not need to be purified from the residues of the movie when the movie comes to an end, because it was never stained by them in the first place. Likewise, your being does not need to be cleansed or healed, because it has never been hurt by experience in the first place.
Your mind and your body may bear the scars, physical or emotional, of your experience, but your being does not carry these scars. To recognise this is the ultimate healing.
Your being is a place of wholeness, of health, fullness, sufficiency, peace.
Whatever the day has asked of you, it has not touched what you are underneath it. Living in Peace, Living as Peaceis a way to spend a little time recognising that directly.
