The Seer

By resting as spacious awareness, we recognize that awareness is the great, loving, and vast source of all phenomena. There is an unmistakable confidence recognized in awareness. It’s not a mental certainty. It is not known only when we are expressing a view about awareness. It is not known through mentally convincing ourselves that awareness is the source. It is a fearless inner knowing that awareness is our primary identity.

This knowing permeates each and every thought, emotion, state, and experience. Even that isn’t quite accurate. Awareness is none other than each thought, emotion, state, and experience. Therefore this confidence is known while thinking about awareness, while not thinking at all, while chopping carrots, and while studying quantum physics. The knowing is unshakable.

Life is perfect seamlessness. The real treasure of awareness is seeing that thoughts, emotions, states, and experiences seamlessly, dynamically, and naturally bleed into one other so much so that the dividing line between them is seen as not real. Thinking will tell you that the experience of eating cake is a separate and distinct act from thinking about drag racing. But direct experience reveals that there is a seamless flow. Basic awareness appears seamlessly as eating cake and then thinking about drag racing. Only thought divides those up into discrete things.

The real beauty is that the thought that divides those things up also seamlessly appears from basic awareness. And the beauty beyond that is that there is a seamlessness even between awareness and the appearances of awareness, between awareness and thinking, between awareness and eating cake, between awareness and thinking about awareness, and between awareness and thinking about eating cake. It sounds complicated until you rely on direct experience. At that point, it is simply the truth. One no longer even sees awareness as something separate from its appearances or vice versa.

It may seem at first that there are separate and discrete thoughts, emotions, states, and experiences happening in awareness. But upon closer examination, there is nothing separate and apart from anything else. The categories ‘awareness,’ ‘thoughts,’ ‘emotions,’ ’states,’ and ‘experiences’ are — themselves — thoughts. Thoughts reify the seamlessness of life, giving the appearance of individual, discrete moments or things happening.

There can be a subtle leaning toward certain appearances and a turning away from others. That leaning itself is a mental point of view. This leaning is done apparently in the name of seeking, maintaining, or recreating the experience of awareness. But awareness is not an experience. It is the ground of each and every experience.

It may appear at first that thinking obscures awareness. It doesn’t. Awareness is the ground of thinking. Nothing obscures awareness because everything is an appearance of awareness, including reification. Reification is a brilliant function of mind. It is no small wonder that the human mind can conceptualize. It is brilliant progress. The intellect is not something to be destroyed or quieted. It is none other than awareness.

So then why does the intellect or thinking seem to obscure awareness? Why do certain emotions, states, and experiences feel like awareness and other emotions, states, and experiences appear to obscure awareness? Perhaps it is because awareness is being treated as a discrete experience or state to get back to or reach in time, rather than as the source of all states, thoughts, emotions, and experiences.

Although at first it may be helpful to rest as awareness and simply notice thoughts appearing and disappearing from awareness (i.e., witnessing), there can be a subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) tendency to disengage from the reifying mind. It is important to say that witnessing thought and disengaging from it are also perfect expressions of awareness.

It’s also important to point out that, in reifying this seamlessness, thought can make thought itself into a problem. Thought then divides up experience between moments of thinking and not thinking and subtly chooses moments of not thinking as favorable. It then mistakenly calls the latter ‘awareness.’ But it’s all awareness. Only thought would separate out the seamless flow of life into categories of thought v. no thought.

So in the moment of believing that thought obscures awareness, a mental point of view is appearing. The point of view is ‘thinking is something separate from what I am and it obscures what I am.’ But this is a misunderstanding of what you are. Life is perfect seamlessness. You are life and life appears as everything.

There is nothing here that is not life including the intellect. The intellect seems to obscure awareness only when we miss that our fundamental, unchanging, primary identity is the source of the intellect — awareness. In that seeing, nothing obscures the source because the source is seen to appear as everything. Does the source obscure itself?

In really abiding in the deep confidence of knowing yourself as the perfect seamlessness of reality, there is a freedom way beyond simply resting as awareness. The freedom is in seeing that every single experience is also awareness. This is a fearless knowing, a confidence that thinking cannot provide.

This is the knowing that awareness, which is what you are, is not just appearing AS each thought, emotion, state, and experience, it IS each thought, emotion, state, and experience. Again, it’s fearless. You know, in this confidence, that nothing can be lost in this perfect seamlessness. There is nothing to be lost and nothing to turn away from because you are everything.

~ by Scott Kiloby

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