Thoughts Arise

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, ...