25 April

One of life’s precious jewels I think, right under our noses. Life-changing. Takes a few words to describe, sorry. What is awareness? In simple physical terms we often think it means ‘I am aware’, meaning ‘me’, up here in my head, is aware of what’s happening around me. But as meditators know, it goes much further. You can drop that ‘me’ point and be aware of everything around you, and all of you - your body, your thoughts - at the same time. Try it if you never have, see if you can be aware of everything around you, and all of you, including your thoughts and feelings and emotions, simultaneously. Hard at first, because we’re so used to isolating out bits of this continuum one at a time - we think we’re like a torch, shining on things around us a piece at a time, when in fact reality is like bright sunlight, everything bathed in light at once. If you get good at that, you’ll notice that ‘me’ changes fundamentally. Rather than being the central viewing point on the world around us, where we look and see and hear outwards and inwards, all outside and inside become the one connected field or space. Your identity becomes that awareness, rather than a separate thing looking *out* at things. Even your thoughts are part of awareness - your thoughts are NOT ‘you’, you can be aware of your thoughts in the same way you can be aware of a car driving by. You’ll also notice that becoming aware of pain or emotions in this way profoundly changes your relationship with them. They stop being ‘my’ feelings or my emotions or my thoughts, and become events in that wider field of awareness. You start to directly feel and experience them as connected to everything around you, your life and problems become connected events in your wider experience of other people and things. But your biggest challenge will likely be thoughts, because we grow up deeply, habitually convinced that we are what we think. So we get trapped in what we think of as ‘inside’ ourselves, in our thoughts, when in fact there is no inside, it’s all a single, connected field of awareness. It’s an illusion, and the most powerful one, we split the field of awareness into two bits - me here, the rest over there. But in reality, it’s all one connected space.