Thoughts Arise

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, ...