Before any story about yourself or the world begins, there is a simple and undeniable knowing: the awareness of being. This essay explores that most fundamental experience and follows it through its implications for how you understand yourself, others and the world you seem to inhabit. It is an invitation to recognise the unity that underlies all experience and to discover how that recognition naturally expresses itself as peace and love.
The Primary Experience of Being
Before you know anything about yourself, before you even know that you are a man or a woman or even a person, you know that you are. I know that I am. In other words, the awareness of being is your primary experience.
Before you know anything about another person, before you know their name, the way they think or feel, their history, before you even know that they are a man or a woman or indeed even a person, you know that they are. And before you know anything about any object, before you know that the world is a world or that the universe is a universe, you know that it is.
Wherever you go in your experience, inwards towards yourself or outwards towards another person, object or world, your primary experience, your most fundamental knowledge, is the awareness of being. And if you do not allow thought and perception to impose their limits upon being, then being reveals itself as a single, infinite, indivisible, whole.
