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You are aware of your experience, and you are also the one who is aware of it. These are two places to stand, and for most of the day attention stands in the first, among the thoughts, feelings and sensations that come and go. The second lies closer than any of them, and nothing that has ever happened in experience has reached it.
Be aware of your entire experience without changing it in any way. Thoughts, memories, images, feelings or emotions, sensations of the body, for instance the tingling of your face, chest, hands or feet, and whatever perceptions of the world may be present: sights, if your eyes are open, sounds, tastes, textures and smells. Be aware of the entirety of your experience without trying to change it in any way.
And if there is any impulse in you to change or manipulate your experience, an impulse that is either left over from the conventional search for happiness in the world or left over from a previous spiritual practice, then that impulse is part of your current experience. Be aware of it without trying to change it in any way.
Now ask yourself, ‘What is it that is aware of my experience?’ But do not allow yourself to answer this question with a word. See what happens to your mind when you ask this question. Where does your mind go to find the answer, not the conceptual answer but the experiential answer? ‘What is it that is aware of my experience?’ Whether you have asked yourself this question many times before or are asking it for the first time, ask it as if for the first time. What is it that knows or is aware of my experience?
How come there is experience? What is it that illuminates experience, rendering it knowable?
Soften the focus of your attention from everything that you are aware of. Be interested in that which is aware. Be interested in being aware.
When I suggest ‘be interested in being aware’, who or what would be interested in being aware? Only awareness is aware, and therefore only awareness can be aware of anything, either the content of experience or the fact of being aware. So when I suggest ‘be interested in being aware’, I am speaking to you, awareness. I am suggesting to you, awareness: soften the focus of your attention from the content of experience. Stop shining your light of pure knowing on thoughts, images, feelings, sensations and perceptions, and come back to your self. Remember your self. Recognise your self. Come back to the simple fact of being aware. That is, come back to your self.
Extricate yourself from the content of experience and come back to the fact of simply being, being aware or awareness itself. Experience is always in movement. Awareness is always at peace.
You are free to lose yourself in the content of experience, in which case you will seem to acquire its qualities, to become its qualities, or to rest in and as awareness, which lies prior to and shines brightly in the midst of all experience. But the choice you make between these two possibilities is perhaps the most important choice you will ever make in your life.
The fact of being, being aware or awareness itself is your primordial nature, your essential self, if we can call it a self. It is what you are before you were born, as they say in the Zen tradition. That is, it is what you are before experience is born in you.
And prior to the arising of experience, being, being aware or awareness itself is pristine, immaculate, silent, luminous, empty: empty of experience but full of itself. And even in the midst of experience it remains as such, just as the screen remains in the same condition whether or not the movie is playing. For this reason your self, awareness, does not need to be stilled, or purified, or perfected or enlightened. Awareness was never endarkened by experience in the first place, and therefore does not need to be enlightened by practice or effort.
Having said that, if you have temporarily lost yourself in the content of experience, then as a concession make the gentle effort to extricate yourself from that experience and return to your self. Returning to your essential nature of being aware, aware being or awareness itself is like getting undressed at night. When you get undressed at night, you take off all the layers of clothing and your naked body is simply revealed. You do not suddenly become your naked body. You were always that, relatively speaking, but you did not notice it or, rather, lost touch with it because it was covered in layers of clothing. But even when your body is covered in layers of clothing, it is still your naked body. It makes no difference.
It is the same with being aware or awareness itself. Awareness is always naked, always in the same condition, whether it is clothed in experience or not. Just as a naked body puts on a uniform in the morning and seems to become a doctor, or a nurse or a chef, without ever ceasing to be itself, so awareness clothes itself in experience, thinking, feeling, sensing and perceiving, and seems to become a person, an entity, a self, without ever ceasing to be itself alone. Do not allow the bright light of pure knowing to be tarnished and darkened by experience.
Remember the poet Shelley:
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity.[1]
Do not allow experience to stain the white radiance of eternity. All experience shines with the knowing of it. Be that knowing. Know your self as that knowing. If you remain as that knowing, you are safe. You touch all experience intimately, but no experience touches you. And if you remain as that knowing, you are always at peace. Experience moves, but you remain still.
Living in Peace, Living as Peace, my recording on remaining in touch with being in an unsettled world, is an invitation to become intimate with the presence that lies beneath the changing circumstances of your lives, a presence that is already whole, already complete and already at peace, and that no experience, however intense, has ever truly touched.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats (1821).
