Aware Being
If we examine our experience at this moment, we will find that phenomena appear and disappear, but there is always something that never appears or disappears. This is the reality of all temporary phenomena that is the always present elusive something, not nothing. It is the essence of everything; unlike the appearances of the mind that come and go, it never does. Its existence just is. It is causeless, unlike the phenomena that come and go, which appear to depend on each other. This is why it is called being. It is not a thing and not nothing. As the 13th Century Buddhist Sage Nichiren states: "Life at each moment encompasses both body and spirit and both self and environment of all sentient beings in every condition of life1, as well as insentient beings -- plants, sky and earth, on down to the most minute particles of dust. Life at each moment permeates the universe and is revealed in all phenomena. One awakened to this truth himself embodies this relationship." In other words, if we can awaken to the realisation that this experience we call causeless ever-present reality is what we are, we will embody this. Our being is indivisible; therefore, if we understand it to be an object, we have mistaken it, for this would imply a limitation to being, and there is none.
Considering this from our experience, it is self-evident that there are temporary phenomena such as thoughts, bodily sensations, and sensations perceived from objects around our body. These experiences come and go. It is immediately evident that we are always present. We are what understand these temporary phenomena. It is not thoughts that think. It is we who are conscious of thoughts that think. A sensation doesn't sense it; we are aware of senses that sense. From this, it is clear that what knows is not the mind but what stands beneath the mind, as it were. This knowing is a capacity that exists regardless of what is known. This knowing is synonymous with being. It is being that knows. This is our experience. We have never experienced our being without the knowing of it. Consciousness does not need to have a mind to perceive itself. It can know itself directly. If we ask ourselves am I aware we know instantly; we are by being aware of it. The mind is not conscious of it. We, this aware being, are directly aware of ourselves. Our aware being does not need a mind to know itself, an institution or someone else. This knowing of being is the primal understanding.
Although we conventionally believe the objective phenomena are known by our aware being as being real, here it becomes clear that it would be impossible to know anything is real unless what knows it is real too. Therefore, the essential being of the phenomena our mind perceives that come and go is the same as our permeant aware being that perceives them. This possibility is the heart of non-duality. All reality is one being. Furthermore, based on our experience, we have no evidence that this aware being we are that is the essence of everything is dependent on our biological form or limited in any way.
Seeing things this way, we embody the possibility of being a universal aware being. Seeing things this way immediately makes apparent that it is only the thought that we are not this universal conscious being and are a separate mortal object that immediately triggers fear in our mind and body, and this thought only appears when we are not consciously seeing ourselves as this universal, eternal, ever-present aware being. Evidence of this is born out in our experience as we notice that fear is induced psychologically whenever thoughts are present that personalise our existence or we have the irrational feeling of being localised in physical time and space. This experience of being localised cannot be attributed to the experience of aware being. The purpose of psychological fear is not to motivate our protection, for it gets in the way of that. It is to remind us to return to abide as our aware being.
Therefore, opening to the possibility of living based on the experience of being this universal aware being and not a temporary phenomenon that appears and disappears and choosing to live as if this were true allows us to test out what it is like to be free of existential fear.
Love
Freyja
