Quynh, who joined one of our recent webinars from Barcelona, began by confessing a certain sadness. She had made a sincere effort to understand and feel this essence, yet the more she tried to experience it, the further away it seemed to move, like a butterfly escaping capture. And when she stopped trying, it felt like giving up.
I suggested to Quynh that she was expecting to experience her true nature as a subtle experience, more refined than her thoughts, feelings and sensations. That expectation projects our true nature away from us as an object. It is as if we believed our eyes were subtle objects: the belief would send us travelling the world in search of them, and a hundred years of searching would never find them.
Even our language concedes too much. Earlier in the meeting I had invited everyone to come back to the feeling of being, and later corrected it to the awareness of being, though even that phrase borrows the language of subject and object. The truth is simpler: you cannot know your self objectively; you can only be your self knowingly. When Quynh asked how to do this, I told her it cannot be done: if I asked her to stand up and take a step towards her self, what would she do? When you recognise your self, you come back to your self. You never go towards your self. The first step is simply to relax.
Then we took that step together. Quynh was undoubtedly aware, of my voice, of her feet on the floor, so I asked her to describe not what she was aware of but the experience of being aware, the ‘I’ that knows. Slowly, eyes closed, doing her best with language, she found it: a knowingness, without boundary, pervading everything, peaceful, weightless. It had no size, no shape, no age, no gender, no nationality. And the common name for all this was not ‘awareness’ or ‘knowing’ but the name she uses every day: I. She had been describing her self, not from book knowledge but from direct experience: a glimpse of her true nature. Not, in fact, her first: nature gives everyone free glimpses, which we normally overlook or misinterpret. But it was the first time she was conscious of recognising it: a big moment in a life.
There is nothing special or mystical here. It is not the self you might become after twenty more years of meditation; it is your self, now. Having travelled this pathway once, Quynh knows the way; in time her true nature will no longer be somewhere she visits but the place where she lives. She told me it felt like a thirty-five-year journey completed in fifteen minutes. Those years were not wasted: they prepared her. As the Japanese potter Hamada replied when asked how long it took him to make a bowl, ‘Five minutes and sixty years.’
What you are looking for is never found at the end of a search, because it is that which is searching. To recognise your self, you need only come back, and having come back once, the way is known.
This is what I explore in ** Living in Peace, Living as Peace**. It is an invitation to become intimate with the presence that lies beneath the changing circumstances of your life, a presence that is already whole, already complete and already at peace, a peace you need never search for, because it has never for a moment been absent.
You’ll find the meditation ** here**.
