Thoughts Arise

We all feel that we fail to express the depth of our love, but love is always perfect. I have seen this clearly: In the experience of love, I am both the subject and the object of love, and the love itself. And, except for the story of this birth, I am you. I have seen this by being you. You are that which sees without eyes, hears sound as music, blossoms as love in the heart. You are the pure awareness which makes experience possible. We cannot be two. Because you are the one true Self, my love for you is boundless; inexpressible even by all expressions of love in their totality. Please understand that the depth of all love is the depth of your true identity. Please let these words express my love for you. Know that this expression is imperfect, but I love you truly for you and I are one. Beyond this life we will forever be together in the ultimate peace. If you can look past your own birth and death, you will see that this is not a belief but a simple truth. There are no individuals

In the vastness of space, imagine a single pinprick of intense light. Now switch the perspective; you are that point of light. To you there is only the emptiness of space. Now the space is receding. It is fading away and soon there will be no reference for you to know that you even exist. Yet, you are and you are not this space. You will prevail. And as soon as there is anything at all, the fact that you prevail will be self-evident. The insight to end all seeking is based on two unassailable facts — “there is something rather than nothing” and “I am”. No other knowledge can be known with the same level of certainty. These facts come from direct knowledge. Since there is something, there can never truly have been nothing. The equations of science describe how a certain something can produce another thing. But as we follow this chain of cause and effect back to its source we approach an incomprehensible nothingness. Could the universe have appeared out of nothing? “I am, but what

When the mind is facing annihilation,  Yet the heart is bursting with joy, You know you have arrived at that threshold,  Where Truth can no longer be denied. When you dare to admit, what is aware is not this mind, body or even “I”,  Thoughts dissolve into understanding, the false identity cannot sustain its lie.    All manifestations are expressions of Reality,  And all interactions are Its will. All experience Its intimacy,  And pain and suffering the depth of Its goodwill. It alone has the capacity for sensing, perceiving, knowing,  For granting forms that passing, yet undeniable, touch of be-ing.   Photo from EurekAlert.org  

Sound waves impinge upon the ear. Delicate instrumentation translates the vibrations into electo-chemical signals. A cacophony of neurons fire, activating each other through charged ions. Only then is there experience; the magic of hearing . The vibrations of molecules and the subsequent activity of brain cells, somehow reflected as music. There is a delay between the time the sound reaches the body to when it is heard . So what is really heard cannot be said to be sound waves. Nor can it be called brain activity, because no conceivable instrument should feel the dance of charged ions inside a head as music originating from outside the head. Every experience is a deeply mysterious echo of activity within the body and the world. It is a ripple in some subtle dimension of spacetime, an afterimage of an event that has already happened, palpably felt through some miraculous law of nature. But the miracle is not just that there is experience. You see, both the body and the world have been

You are the event horizon between the unknowable and the known. A threshold beyond which all concepts break down. You can know all manner of things and actions. But if you think you know yourself, you have identified with thoughts and abstractions. Whatever you identify with is always phenomenal and hence unreal. But what you are is among the noumenal; firmly rooted in the real. Can you deny the self-knowledge which tells you "I AM"? That, shining brighter than all else, points to how this dream began. Beyond the horizon, towards the indivisible singularity. Towards the nondual nature of reality.   Photo from medium.com  

I am the darkness that was there before the light, I am the nothingness you spurn by day, yet yearn by night. You and I are inseparable; not two, For reality is singular; this you already know to be true. We may seem like opposites to the mind, But are simply facets of That which it seeks and cannot find. Next time you wake up and witness the stirring of life, Notice from where the body and mind arise. In that serene moment before all the trouble begins, Are you not identical to the void, that no-thing? Remember, what you have feared was never the dark, But what may appear within it, to rend you apart.   Photo from labroots.com  

There’s a knock at the door. You open it to find an oddly shaped, red object. You pick it up in curiosity. There’s a card next to it that you could have sworn wasn’t there a moment ago. It says, “This is yours”. You bring the object into the house and are contemplating it when there is another knock. A green one! “Yours truly,” says the card with this one. The odd looking shapes keep arriving. You begin to stack them around the house. Red ones titled “Opinions” in the master bedroom, green ones titled “Fantasies” in the lounge, blue ones titled “Memories” in the backyard, and those confusing multicolored ones called "Emotions" down in the basement. At some point you’re a bit fed up with all the knocking. The next object that arrives is promptly kicked out. The card attached to it swings open as it flies away, “Not mine!” How can all these things be yours if they are coming from a source unknown? Who is delivering them anyway? Poof! Your body has disappeared. “Ah, this must be

Trace chemicals linger in the air. The wind blows them towards delicate sensors. A receptor fires off, then more in rapid succession. A chain reaction begins. Electrical charges relay the signal from one node to the next, activating them at an incredible rate. It is like a flash of lightning in the darkness of night, illuminating one intricate path among the myriad possibilities of the rest. Spacetime seems to shift. A child squats at the edge of a garden bed. The smell of freshly cut grass lingers in the air. The face of his grandmother smiles radiantly as she points at an earthworm wriggling in the soil. The reminiscence fades back into the present. An interaction of matter associated with electrical activity. A smell associated with a distant memory. The physical and the mental are inseparable. Asleep now, but brain activity spikes. He is a woman waiting in the backseat of a car. Feeling vulnerable, she locks the door. The scene outside the window begins to shift and she realises th

There is a stage in a theatre. An actor performs the whole day, act after act, until she blanks out in exhaustion. Then she starts all over again. But that is not how it is. There is a host on stage. The host invites the performers, disappears backstage, and then appears again to introduce the next performance. But that is not how it is. There is an audience viewing the performance. It is held rapt by the show, only occasionally given an intermission to draw breath. But that is not how it is. There is no host, nor any performers. It is all a play of light. But that is not all. What seemed to be the audience is just cardboard cutouts. But that is not all. The theatre has no ceiling or walls. The stage is boundless. The performance is endless. But that is not all.  The performance is being watched.  But by whom? Photo created by tawatchai07 – www.freepik.com

The day your mother was born was also the day that the seed of your body came into this world. Women are born with their lifetime supply of eggs; what is now your body was one such egg. So prior to consciousness, your body – what you associate with most – had already started to take shape. But, of course, the process that resulted in your body goes even further back; to your grandmother and her mother and so on, till you find that you are the product of an unbroken chain going back to the very first stirrings of life on Earth. That life was made possible by its parent planet and star. Go back all the way, and we see that each one of us is inseparable from the emergence of the universe itself. Matter, energy, consciousness and life all have their basis in a seeming nothingness – the Unmanifest – that gave birth to this bubble of spacetime ruled by cause and effect. In fact, since the universe emerged when there was nothing but this mysterious potential for manifestation, the universe an

Eyes closed, body forgotten, drifting in and out of dreams, I realised I had all the ingredients needed to create the world we see. As I woke up and looked into my child’s eyes, I knew we were the same beyond our temporal disguise. The creative force behind our dreams, Bears the mark of what must always have been. That which can turn darkness to light, Is that which can bring a universe to life. This spark, lighting the mind without pause, Is at the root of it all — the real, most fundamental; the causeless cause.   Photo created by andreonegin – www.freepik.com  

Everything we have ever seen or will see is made visible by light. We see an amazing variety of shapes, colours, textures and objects, yet all these forms are really just the reflection of light. Seen this way, all visible forms are as illusory as holograms. What we see are fluctuations in the universal field of electromagnetism, rather than separate things. But this is not the entire truth. The light we see when our eyes are open, is the same light we see in darkness as visions and dreams. So light can even appear to us in the absence of an external source. Visible light enables the sensory perception of sight, but the conscious experience of sight depends on the light of consciousness. This applies not just to sight, but to every experience. There is a unity to consciousness as our senses merge to form aspects of a single conscious experience. Whatever is known through the mind, is a reflection of the light of consciousness. From this perspective, consciousness can be seen as fundame

Your body has been changing ever since its conception. Only some of its cells last a lifetime. Do you identify yourself as just those cells and not the others? You may consider that the brain defines who you are. Yet there are parts of the brain which seem to operate like a machine, empty of experience. So what you call "me" would have have to be defined as a subset of the brain; as certain networks that are in constant flux, at times active and then dormant. Yet you seem to be stable amongst the fluctuation of brain activity. Isn't it pleasant to lose yourself completely in activity? Don’t you wake up every morning to a continuity of being that is there prior to memory or thought? The fact is that the body, as you know it, only exists in your mind. The sensations, sights, sounds, and abstract concepts that define it, are all amongst the contents of your mind. These passing phenomena cannot be you. There are layers to your mind, shifting and changing. What was unnoticed o

Imagine blowing a bubble. It travels away from you, but then the wind shifts and it lands back on your body. Throughout its brief journey, the bubble remained in your field of awareness. This field is what is being investigated in nondual mindfulness. It's just on the surface and available to all. Isn’t that just attention? Attention is awareness directed at an object. It can only jump amongst the phenomena that appear in the field of awareness. Now imagine the bubble pops and your attention moves to the part of your body where the bubble landed. Your focus shifted, but the body was already in the field of awareness. Consider how staying focused requires effort. Awareness is effortless. Ok, my brain generates this field of awareness allowing me to be conscious of the external world. So what? The implications of what you’ve noticed may not be immediate. But they are very deep and liberating. The world and the contents of your mind are in perpetual motion. Awareness is the only const

When a sage says ‘I’, they do not refer to an individual, but to the ‘I’ that is common in every experience. There are a multitude of experiences, but underlying them all is an essential awareness, that fundamental  ‘I’, which is the ground for all experience. On the surface, there seem to be a multitude of separate selves. But what separates them are just dimensions of experience, such as memories, concepts and the range of perceptions. To the enlightened, these are ethereal forms made of the light of consciousness. The forms are illusory, the light is real. Thus disregarding any attribute of individuality, all experience is seen as the domain of a single Self. What exactly this essential being is, cannot be known. But the universe can only be known because of It. That ‘I’, which must be present for any experience, is fundamental to reality. I, the unborn and unchanging, infinite potentiality, inexhaustible possibility. Photo created by kdekiara – www.freepik.com

“Anatta. Not mine, not me.” Frustration arises from the negation of self. “Isn’t everything appearing in my consciousness?” Attention momentarily lands on the clouds. “Not mine, but in my mind. A part of my consciousness? A part of me ?” Experience flows, time passes. The parts highlighted by attention don’t come close to painting the whole. There is always more to experience; a continuous stream of phenomena, more than can ever be fully recognised in a moment of time. “Yet in all these parts, not a single one that I can identify as me.” The background and the foreground, even the sense of self is effortlessly rendered here. As is the searing brilliance of the sun behind the clouds. “The field of consciousness is too overwhelming, too vast, too impersonal to be me!” What was thought to be a separate self entity, is found to simply be a stream of experience. Made possible by some mysterious quality of the universe. “Consciousness. Not mine, not me!” The loss of identity is not mourned,

A question I look at the tree at arm’s length. I see my body below. Both impenetrable beyond the surface. I identify with one but not the other. From familiarity? From the range of sensation? The hand I raise to touch the tree has gone through so much change. Tanned, vascular, fine hair at the back of the fingers; this hand suddenly seems unfamiliar. The leaves of the conifer have a distinct texture; pliable yet with the firmness of geometric shape. The intimacy of touch only adds to the riddle; where do I draw the line between myself and the world? A clue It’s soon after sunrise on a cloudy day. There hasn’t been any rain, which makes the rainbow seem even more magical. I know it to be illusory, and that somehow makes its beauty more profound. As my eyes follow the rainbow's arc into the clouds I wonder if they are any less of an illusion? The clouds have form and texture I posit. Yet the form is nothing like this solid appearance, and the textures are the play of light and shadow

Amidst the calm of meditation, thoughts emerge and subside. What is the origin of these reveries? If I am in control of my thoughts, why can’t I stop thinking? "I am the thinker,” says a voice. But the voice is recognised as just another thought. The "I" is self-referential. “I, the thought, am the thinker,” admits the voice. The thought and thinker cannot be truly separate! They arise entangled, in mutual dependence, neither possible as independent entities. In between thoughts, there is no thinker. And the thinker of one thought can seem quite different from another. “You are neither the thought, nor the thinker,” concludes the final revelation. What is left unsaid appears wordlessly; I am that in which the thought/thinker appears. So vast, such potential! And yet even this space of knowing needs a known. Could it really exist on its own?   Photo created by anake – www.freepik.com  

In the quiet darkness the cavern feels boundless. A low note reverberates through the space giving rise to thousands of mesmerising shapes. Coloured in hues of turquoise and emerald, they are breathtaking as they dance to the symphony. The shapes are music, and I am the cavern. Where does music live? In the instrument that generates it, the sound waves that carry it to my ears, or in the signals being deciphered by the brain? In this moment I know the answer is none of those. The music only exists in the space of consciousness. I am the place where music lives. The next day I feel compelled to run in the rain with this phrase echoing through my mind. The wetness across my face, that pitter patter sound, the smell of rain, the howl of the wind and its force against my chest. I am the place where rain falls. The glistening leaves and grass, waving in the wind. I am the awareness of green and the exuberance of life. My feet against the ground, the sensations of my breath and heart. I am t