To enter the human experience is to enter a great forgetting. The veil of the conditioned mind obscures the truth of who we really are, casting us into a world of separation, limitation and doubt. So who are you really? Are you just a mind living in a body, navigating through life, trying to find happiness and avoiding suffering? Or maybe something else entirely, something much deeper, something eternal. Something that can't be explained in words. Something that when realized brings true peace and true fulfillment. Here we're going to look beyond the veil of the mind, beyond thoughts and sensations, to find out the truth of who we really are. So what is the mind? Throughout history, this question has been asked countless times. From humanity's earliest spiritual and scientific inquiries the human mind has been conceptualized and understood in various ways across different cultures. Humans have used philosophy, psychological and scientific theories as well as methods of direct investigation to penetrate the mind's secrets.. to find out who we are beyond the mind and body. Ordinarily we think of mind as being maybe something inside the head like the brain and it's do with thinking and cognition but the mind is much deeper than this. The mind is actually duality. It's also known as Maya or Illusion. It's also known as ego. In Latin the word ego means simply "I". When the sense of "I" is limited to some thing it is maya, illusion, but when it's unlimited... when it wakes up as consciousness itself, within which all phenomena arises and passes away, then there's no longer an identification with a separate "I". The true meaning of the word "I" is infinite awareness, infinite consciousness That's the only "I" or the only Self there is. However for most of us our sense of our self has become so entangled in the content of experience... thoughts, images, feelings, and so on, that we don't perceive ourself as we essentially and originally are. But we know ourselves in a modified way... mixed with the content of experience. And this mixture of the true and only "I" of infinite awareness or infinite Consciousness with the content of experience makes for this illusory self which is what is usually referred to as the the ego or the separate self. The ego is an idea very persistent very strong, very solid, that we are a person... a separate entity inside a body mind. Or sometimes we think to be just a body mind. The ego is an aspect of the mind which forms at a young age and it's that aspect which gives us a sense of I am an individual me. The ego is literally a made up entity and it's not real and it's that which we identify as the body. It's the part of the mind that thinks it's separate. The ego is the personal sense of me but it's not the true self. It's a whole imagined construct of me it's not ultimately who I am. Ultimately who I am is that which is deeper and this underlying presence that's always here. The dualistic mind is made of two fundamental aspects... the witness and what is witnessed. There's the phenomena of the world made up of sensations perceptions and egoic preferences, and then there's the sense that there's an "I" that is separate, witnessing. Awakening is waking up from this duality... from the split between witness and witnessed. Between subject and object, to realize primordial awareness that is ever present. If you look at young children, young children don't have an ego and they live in a state of participation. They live in a state of exhilaration, because they are not separate to the world. When we're born we're dependent and we don't yet have conceptual thinking. As we develop, we develop concepts and what's called self-awareness, which is the ability to reflect on what we're doing in order to become independent. So that thinking process becomes this internal identity. The formation of the ego begins soon after birth. We begin to develop a personal identity which we eventually call "I" or "me". The mirror stage in human development is the point at which a child recognizes themself in a mirror, usually around 6 to 18 months of age. And it is just one part of the formation of the ego via the process of identification. It's not that we get our ego from recognizing a character in the mirror. It's part of a socialization process or conditioning as those around us begin to treat us as a separate person, as a separate "I". We learn to identify a sense of "I" through the sensations that arise on the body, through perception and conceptualization of things. The mind divides and separates one thing from another, and then we develop preferences towards those things. Some things we like, some some things we don't like. This "I" becomes our individual separate and unique identity as we move through life. It is the story of who we believe we are. And the consciousness that we are, starts to believe it when we are very young. When we are children and it grows with us until we are completely convinced to be a person. As people grow and move towards adolescent and into adulthood they develop a sense of separation; a sense of being an "I" who lives inside their heads. So they become separate egos who live in a state of wanting, a state of incompleteness, whose lives are dominated by a desire to accumulate things to compensate for their incompleteness. It's the mind that causes all the issues all the problems. The mind is a power that creates the entire illusion of separation... The entire illusion or appearance of being a person living in a world. We could experientially verify that every time we experience psychological suffering we can always trace it back to the belief to be this separate person, this separate entity. There are no exceptions, no exceptions. I'm not talking about physical pain, but psychological suffering is absolutely unnecessary it is predicated upon the belief to be this separate or apparently separate body mind. Because we're like fragments who've been broken away from the whole, like jigsaw pieces that have become disconnected and spread far apart. So there is a feeling of "something's missing", "something's not right". The mind seems like an insurmountable obstacle. How can we overcome the mind? The mind seems to have no end. Attempting to conquer the mind using the mind creates an endless struggle. Akin to trying to lift oneself up by pulling on one's own bootstraps. The ego structure can feel devastated, lost and confused, feeling that life has no meaning, and as that seeking mind struggles we experience what St John of the Cross called The Dark Night of the Soul. This is a necessary part of the disillusionment process. It is only by letting go of seeking and the false identification with the seeker that we come into direct union with life. I was in a good place in my life. I had sort of given up on the spiritual search, not because I'd given up as such but because there was nothing else really to look for. I wasn't seeking enlightenment. I wasn't seeking a awakening. I was seeking peace and I was seeking happiness and I found that surrender to what is was the only way and that life was my teacher. After many many many years of searching everything fell away. The structure of the me that I knew myself as fell away. I was sitting in my living room and over a period of a few weeks a great sort of inner desolation seemed to appear in me. So this was unexpected, this vast inner landscape of darkness... a kind of abandonment... an existential abandonment from life itself. And I noticed how the mind's movement wanted to move away from this inner landscape of darkness. And I asked a question to myself: "What is the meaning of suffering? What is the nature of suffering? How can suffering end?" Or perhaps it doesn't end and in that question what arose was this willingness to not move from where I was, to not move away from that dark landscape, and to surrender in that even if it meant the end of me. And I didn't know what that meant, the end of me, but it came up as a kind of knowing that wasn't yet conscious, and in that moment totally unexpectedly the whole structure of self died. It's like the whole 'me' identity died, and surprisingly there was a merging with life itself that ended the separation between me and life. And from that point on I knew that I and life are one; there is no separation... it's all in the mind's movement. And from that point on the whole structure of this 'Amoda' that had been built on a victim identity, not just a victim of circumstances, but a victim of my feelings a victim of emotions, a victim of thoughts, and therefore constantly trying to change those, to change thoughts to change feelings, to make them better, to make them more positive, to make them more uplifted... that ended. And without the victim it was as if I was born anew. So I died and I was reborn in that. It's like all the veils of perception that were built on the identity of Amoda as a me with her history, with her thoughts, with her beliefs, with her experiences, just came undone. So it was totally naked from that moment on and it's never changed since then. In Buddhism the first Noble Truth is that there is suffering. There is this inherent dissatisfaction within the conditioned mind. Dukkha or the chronic dissatisfaction of the mind encompasses not only physical and emotional pain but also more subtle forms of dissatisfaction such as the inherent impermanence of all things and the inability to find lasting satisfaction in worldly pursuits. True happiness or fulfillment cannot be found in external material pursuits. Even when things go the way we think they should. Even when we're following the script, being a good person, we have successful relationships, successful careers, even then there's often this underlying sense that something's just not quite right. Something that we're missing, something that we're not perceiving accurately, and the closer we look at that often it becomes more vivid, more obvious. So what I often say is the first step in the awakening process is acknowledging that we suffer. We could summarize it by saying it's a sort of sense that life just isn't functioning right, or perhaps I'm not functioning right within life. But it's uncomfortable... it's grace that it's uncomfortable because it leads us into this investigation that can take us to places that we never could have imagined. Why do people suffer? If we talk about physical pain we have to understand that the reason why we experience physical pain is because physical pain is a protection device that we have genetically inherited. If we never experienced pain we would constantly bump into objects and our body would drink sulfuric acid and our body wouldn't last for too long. The reason of psychological pain is different. It is: "you're making a mistake". So psychological pain is not a problem, it is the beginning of the solution. Psychological pain is telling us a lesson about another mistake we make which is to believe we are a separate human being. That's a mistake... that's a fundamental mistake. It is the original sin; the original sin that kicks us out of the Kingdom, out of the garden of Eden. The original meaning of the word sin means "to miss the mark". Egoic consciousness is a pathological state of mind whereby we constantly miss the mark. This is the meaning of "the fall". We are focused on the fruits of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, focused on thoughts. The dualistic mind is made of the phenomena that forms the perceived world of form; made of sensations, perceptions, egoic preferences, and this sense that there is an "I" that is separate, witnessing. It is this "I" thought that is at the root of identification with the ego. Whatever we are experiencing it is I who am experiencing it. If I am sad or anxious or lonely it is I who am having that experience. If I'm talking with you it is I who am talking. If I'm seeing the world it is I who am seeing the world. So all our experience revolves around this "I". "I" is the central character in all our experience so that the essential investigation... the prerequisite for awakening, is to explore and recognize the nature of the "I" or the self that we really are. In the heart Sutra one of the most revered teachings of Buddhism it says that to be liberated we must realize this entire mechanism of the dualistic mind to be empty of self. When the "I" thought drops, then duality itself collapses. Form is realized as exactly emptiness, emptiness exactly form. In the samadhi state, emptiness dances as fullness, stillness is inherent within movement, silence inherent within sound. Life is experienced directly, not mediated via the filter of the mind. When we no longer go after the fruits of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, when we no longer interface with the world in the old way, it is liberation, the end of suffering. As long as we believe to be having our own mind or our own ignorance or our own ego, it is because we are viewing this from a separate point of view and this is okay you know at the beginning that's how you're going to see it. But it's not how things are in reality. In reality there is only life. That's it. Only pure life into action So suffering is this resistance to life, resistance to our yes, resistance to our no, resistance to anything that is appearing, because we feel separated. And awakening is the healing of this separation, of this idea to be separated. We can start to understand egoic resistance in the mind by observing the larger principle of how all energy moves in the universe. One way to understand is by looking at something called a Lichtenberg figure. A Lichtenberg figure is a pattern that occurs when high voltage electrical discharge passes through materials. The electrical discharge creates a pattern of branching channels that look like trees. Here electricity is going into wood. In this example the Lichtenberg figure is created by injecting trillions of electrons into an acrylic block using a 5 million volt particle accelerator. All physical matter, in this case the acrylic block, is a resistance or slowing down of energy. In a thunderstorm the resistance of the air affects the formation of the conductive channel and the current flow. When we observe the treelike structures created by the energy we're seeing the path that energy took through the medium through time. These treelike patterns or branching patterns are found at all levels and scales of nature, from the micro to the macro. The very fabric of the universe is a play of form, a play of resistance; one giant mind playing a kind of hide and seek with itself. Samskaras or unconscious patterns are created when the charge of an experience is high. Energies come together and the "I" thought appears. Resistance appears. If there's no resistance then energy just passes through life flows through. But when there's resistance, when "I" appears, then the energy branches off, creating new pathways in the unconscious mind. These patterns run autonomously, hiding and growing in the shadows until they're revealed again and consciously integrated into the whole. The very first memory I have is of being really scared and I didn't know why I was scared and feeling like something was going to go wrong in any particular moment, and that feeling persisted throughout my whole life and intensified in my 20s. And I sank into a deep depression even after having four children. And I ended up going through probably 3 or 4 years where I was really searching for something but didn't know what that was. I never heard about awakening, didn't know what that was. And over time it began to become clear that whatever I was looking for wasn't to be found in my outer life. I had a good family, good business at the time; all the things that anyone could want. And yet still felt really empty inside, and eventually as part of healing from my depression I discovered meditation and dived into that, found some kind of peace, some deep sense of contentment, and for the first time in my entire life that sense of dread or fear had disappeared just momentarily for that first time ever. So I began to try to find out everything I could about what had happened, why that change. And why it had come back again, that feeling of fear. I began to research different spiritual pathways and came across this term awakening, enlightenment, and began to try to understand what that is. Eventually 15-20 years later came to recognize that it is when we're not believing our thoughts anymore. Thoughts might still be going on, but the fear was coming from believing my thoughts, believing that I was just a person or someone who was going about my life, and came to see I was a lot more than that. I am infinite and that over a period of 5 years that began to stabilize for lack of a better word. I had to look at everything that was coming up in the way of that, the sense of not being a good enough parent, the sense of this feeling of inadequacy in my core. I had to really look at that and investigate that and contemplate that. And eventually the peace became stable effortless, and even joy and love, sometimes even bliss. A deep sense of everything being okay, feeling at home, feeling safe, feeling that I can love myself, I like myself which is something that was not possible before for me. Many people get a glimpse of awakening but then seem to lose it. There's this game of I've got it and then I've lost it, or I'm awake and now the mind has come back. This happens when awakening is not fully recognized for what it is. Often there's a pleasant state when samadhi occurs; energy, bliss or a change in the mind consciousness or perception and a sense of ease or freedom. And one will naturally mistake the phenomenal state for the truth of who you are. Often after a glimpse of awakening one will start seeking states or experiences rather than recognizing the awareness that is already present, and realizing it to be the source of true fulfillment. The truth of who you are is not a temporary state or experience. The phenomena comes and goes but the one who remains, primordial awareness, always IS. If you continue seeking states or experiences, eventually the seeker will get stronger and stronger and you will get farther and farther from the truth. The Seeker always misses the mark by chasing what is impermanent, just like an addict chasing temporary highs, and just like the addict the false seeker will always come to a crisis point or failure point. Life is a festival of addictive patterns of behavior and when I say that I don't mean only addiction to drugs like alcohol and nicotine. Everything that is preponderant in society tends to be addictive patterns of behavior; addiction to reality television, addiction to celebrity life addiction to buying the next pair of shoes, and why is that? The reason for that is that we are desperate to find a way to escape the profoundly meaningless and unnatural way of life that we have. But we don't know how to escape that so we try to compensate for it by engaging in addiction. Now understanding reality has this peculiar characteristic of making life more natural, making life better aligned with the rhythm and flow and the directions of nature. If that happens there is no need for the addiction anymore, and we will live more fulfilling, healthier overall better lives without skewed perspectives like the notion that your life is about you and my life is about me, which is one of the most unnatural things imaginable. It's like the blossom on my apple tree thinking my life's about me and I need to survive forever. If the blossom had its way there would be no more apples and no more apple trees. Once we understand the truth there is naturally a flip from an ego centered life or a life that is constantly feeding the patterns of craving and aversion, to a life that is more natural, more in the flow. And then it can happen at a certain point that this idea goes into crisis and maybe we start to seek spiritually or maybe before then some psychological inquiry. Then comes a moment in which we are ready to see beyond this illusion of being separated and let's say a conscious spiritual seeking starts. This spiritual seeking might starts before we are aware that we are spiritually seeking. When it's conscious we can see this unfolding of life no more as something to fight against, but as an invitation to wake up, so we start to be more open to life. Also suffering is the best natural tool to foment insight. We don't ask the deep questions unless we are suffering. If you're not suffering we just sort of ride the wave of life in a very Epicurean lighthearted superficial manner, and we never stop to think about what is happening. Who am I? what is this about? No. What is the purpose of it all? What's the meaning of it? We don't ask those questions unless we suffer. So suffering is a tremendous tool. It's very conducive to insight. Now we make it worse than it needs to be. We invent unnecessary superfluous suffering. I like to call it meta-suffering, and meta suffering comes from that little voice in your head that says you are suffering and you shouldn't be. That doubles the suffering right there. Because now not only do we still have the suffering that's natural and part of your life and you can't avoid, now you have the meta-suffering for being at war with nature, for being at war with the original suffering. The game is not to get rid of a natural process conducive to insight, a key tool of nature, the game is to not exacerbate it unnecessarily by waging war against it When we drop resistance to suffering then it is no longer suffering. It transmutes into something that is for your benefit. Often in spiritual circles we hear the phrase "love what is." It is possible to love whatever pain is arising by learning to surrender egoic preferences understanding that what is arising is simply intense phenomena that actually takes you deeper into connection with life By remaining equanimous with what is, we begin purifying the patterns of resistance within the ego structure. This brings us to the surrender paradox. The surrender paradox is realizing that whatever you resist persists. The resistance actually gives power to the ego. The ego is nothing but the resistance itself. Sometimes on the path we get the idea that we shouldn't experience this or that emotion. We might feel that we're regressing if we feel hate or anger. The experience of the full range of human emotions is necessary. The paradox is that when we accept each emotion fully, dropping the resistance to it, it transmutes from emotion, which is full of beliefs, judgments, and and preferences, to pure feeling; to pure aliveness, which is beyond the evaluating mind. There's a famous story in Zen that illustrates this point. Once a student asked Tenzin, a Zen master known for his wisdom and tranquility, "Master when your wife passed away did you feel sadness?" Tenzin replied "Of course I felt sadness, how could I not?" The student was puzzled and then asked, "But I thought you were a Zen master. Shouldn't you be beyond such emotions?" Tenzin smiled gently and responded, "Ah, you misunderstand. When I felt sadness I allowed myself to feel it fully, and to experience it deeply. And in doing so I honored the truth of that moment. Then like clouds passing through the sky the sadness came and went. But the sky, the vastness of my being, remained unchanged. My awakening began really when I was in graduate school, when a series of personal experiences really challenged me To begin to question the purpose of life, of my life in particular, and the meaning. I began questioning, what's the point of all that I was doing. The experience was one of just being aware without being anything in particular. It was very liberating. There was a great sense of release, like something that had been under great pressure releasing, and there was relaxation and exhilaration, and all I remember was just being. That's all I want to be... just be. Nothin in particular. I call it the big shift for me. It really changed... almost like I want to say "inside out" but the way I saw things and the way I experienced things, the way I saw people, interacted with people.. and the flip is in the sense that all that I was experiencing, no matter what I was doing or saying, is simply awareness being expressed. The awareness that I am being expressed, so in that moment, in any moment, whatever I was saying or doing, that's all that was happening is being aware, and that has stayed. But it has continued to reveal its nature. It was like I could see thoughts flowing by, and whatever action needed to happen, the action just came up and then the body was just basically acting out the action. It was no longer like before, whereas before I would think something, "I think I need to do this " and the "I" this person would be doing it. No. What's happening, what started to happen was, I'm just being. Being aware and actions just were arising and then the body was the tool and I was watching it in real time. The body is simply implementing any action arising in awareness and I happen to be a participant and an observer. I think that's the best part. Awareness is choiceless. The true Self is beyond choosing. Upon hearing that, one might say "okay I'm going to give up everything. I'm just not going to choose anything. I'll just sit in a cave. And many people have done that. But the problem is, that would still be a choice. I'm just choosing to suppress my choices and desires. It's the conditioned mind choosing to not choose. Both choosing and non-choosing are all at the level of the conditioned mind. But who or what is aware of that mind? After awakening you will find the conditioned self may still choose its favorite tea. It will still eat the diet that is best for the body. It's not that choosing isn't happening anymore. Many choices are still happening, arising all the time. But the difference is the sense of "I" is not entangled with any of that. The "I" thought has dropped away. "I" am not choosing, nor am I suppressing choice. So waking up is like demolishing the invisible walls of the ego, this armor, and recognizing our Oneness with it all. And the result is outstanding because we discovered that we were not suffering anger, pain, sadness... we were suffering our refusal of life, and we can learn to be so open that we are consciously one with life as it is. We'd rather feel good than suffer.. that's just normal, something in the human being, the ordinary species of homo sapiens, would rather feel good than feel bad. And I think that in the times when we become aware that it actually feels good to be conscious, something in us registers in the ordinary human brain, "Oh, I like this. This is possible." And it reinforces itself. Awakening can happen in stages gradually, or it can happen all at once in a radical flip, where we suddenly know who we are, as if waking from a dream. As if we've been asleep all our lives in our dream character. To stay awake there is an ongoing purification of the self structure required. Even if we have a full awakening it is important to be vigilant, to not believe the next thought, to remain equanimous with what is when unconscious thoughts surface. Otherwise the unconscious patterns of the mind may obscure the truth The unconscious must become a transparent unconscious. If we do not face what is in the unconscious we'll fall into what has been called spiritual bypassing. Spiritual bypassing refers to the tendency of some individuals to insist that they are already awake in order to avoid dealing with difficult emotions, unresolved psychological issues, or real life challenges. The egoic mind can appropriate a glimpse of awakening and keep one from living from that place of truth. I was sitting on my bed thinking about the mammogram I was about to go for the next day, and it had always been an extreme anxiety producing experience which I had once a year, and I was tired of feeling so scared. Tired of being afraid of dying and I was sitting on the bed and out of the blue I had this thought Couldn't I do this thing tomorrow without freaking out? And there was a thought really, just a thought but suddenly I felt this surge of a realization that I could indeed. And I didn't know how I knew that. I didn't know what had just changed, but something clearly had just changed. And I was stunned and I suddenly knew that it was going to be different from all the terrible anxiety I'd had all the years prior. And that didn't mean that the mammogram was going to turn out fine. It didn't mean I didn't have breast cancer. That was really bizarre to me. It was a stunner and I got up and went in to my partner who was busy at his computer and I just stood in the doorway and he finally looked up he realized I was there and he said "What?" And I said, something's just happened. And I told him in the coming days little by little I began to realize it wasn't just that fear didn't seem to animate me anymore. I felt peaceful, completely without my ordinary ongoing stress. My mind was still. My outer life was basically the same but it was many months before I understood that this was awakening that had happened. It was a long time really. All I knew was I didn't hurt anymore in the way I had. And my mind was quiet and it's been like that ever since. There can be no memory of awakening itself There is only memory of experiences and phenomena. Whenever there is a memory there's always some resistance trace in the mind. This resistance trace is the original repetition... the beginning of the "I" thought. Awakening itself does not leave a trace in the mind. It is not an experience. Primordial awareness wakes up to itself in the now, unmediated by memory and the filtering of the mind. If we are chasing any state, any experience, and trying to live there, then we've missed it. If it comes and goes, if it's not here now then it's not your true nature. Let's take a moment to inquire directly into our true nature. Directly means not via the mind. You cannot recognize that which is beyond the mind by means of the mind. Shift your attention inward and be aware of this moment. Become aware of awareness itself. Notice the thoughts, sensations and emotions that arise within this space, but also recognize the spaciousness within which they arise. Phenomena may bubble up from the unconscious. Thoughts, memories, feelings, emotions, energies; this is a natural clearing process that unfolds when we inquire. Just be open to anything that arises as a result of your inquiry. Allow yourself to abide in the natural state of the mind, free from the limitations of conceptual elaboration. So my own awakening occurred in essentially two fundamentally different movements. I approached the initial shift from a place of suffering, profound suffering, and I had known that it had something to do with thoughts. It had something to do with the way I was thinking, the way I was perceiving the world, the way I was perceiving myself. And this led me into a direct investigation of the nature of thought itself. And most importantly the nature of the thinker; the nature of the one who is seemingly bound by those thoughts. So with this direct investigation the sense of being a thinker was dissolved and with the sense of being a thinker being dissolved, then all thought forms sort of lost meaning to me. What I didn't realize is when that happens we're left with a sort of pure or unbound conscious experience. And to me that was tremendously peaceful, tremendously relieving of my suffering. That was the first part of my awakening. I had no idea even from there with the clarity that was revealed, with the peace that was revealed, that it could go deeper That it could go a lot deeper. So over a period of a few days the initial glimpse, the initial very profound, very releasing, and surprising experience broke open into something that goes beyond the human dimension; goes beyond the confines of who I take myself to be in any form at all. And how I take the world to be in any form at all. All of that was dismantled. What was left, what is left it is extremely difficult to actually formulate into words, but through the book, through direct interactions with people who are interested in addressing this, it can be revealed and it can be revealed to that that person if they're ready for it and interested in investigating it themselves. No one can tell you what the mind is, what the matrix is, what you are. To know the immeasurable, the ineffable, the mind must be extraordinarily quiet and still without any movement. In that deep quiet and profound silence there's a possibility of coming upon something which is timeless, eternal and beyond all measure. Let's say, to make a metaphor that awakening is when your head, the head of the ego, has been chopped by life. You saw clearly that you are not your bodymind. You're not an entity inside the bodymind but yes, the head has been chopped by life but it's still rolling down the hill, and as it's rolling down the hill it carries with it old patterns, old schemes, old point of views, that are no more nourished by your attention. You're resting in the witnessing solidly, you see these old patterns unfolding, you're not involved with them, but they're still happening. So the head is rolling down the hill but at a certain point it is going to stop. No more movement of old karmas coming into action. No more patterns emerging that you need to look for and dissolve. They're gone. And that's Moksha, that's Liberation. What I've been seeing is a progressive opening up to seeing life not as a person inside the body, but as a peaceful silent witnessing of it in which there were moments in which there was just actions, but there was no doer of those actions. A dog was barking... it was just a barking in the silence, or there was somebody walking, or my body walking, and it was just the walking. Not somebody walking. And this was accompanied with the silencing of the inner dialogue that was sometimes accompanying my life. So these moments of stepping out of this sense of being a person came more and more frequently. And as this was happening everything that I thought to be, or to be engaged in life started to have a different sense. Instead of seeing like life against me or difficult for me, or trying to ask to pray for a change, I started to become able to see that all that was aiming towards something higher, to open my heart more. To be more available to life. I started to see that what I called accidents or mistakes or things I didn't like, they were not wrong, and they were not against me. They were actually showing me a deeper reality which I was not in contact with. So all prayers became more like an amen. Thy will be done. All requests were more like, help me to see where I'm still refusing life, where I'm still refusing something. Where I still am suffering because I say no to the unfolding of life itself. So there was an opening up. And more this opening up to life happened and more these moments of conscious witnessing came. Awakening is just the beginning of this opening up. And it never ends in a way. It is a never ending opening. And the more this happens, more what we still see as difficult as contraction as fear, you really see that it's a trampoline towards a higher love. A dimension of love, of peace, of compassion, and we are all in it. Even those we think they're not. We are all taken in it. We can know that consciousness exists. That we can know for certain. Everything else we can make educated guesses about. Maybe very good guesses, but guesses nonetheless. Consciousness is the only pre theoretical given fact of nature. Everything else are theoretical abstractions that arise within consciousness. Consciousness is the sole axiom of nature. That it exists is the only absolutely certain thing in nature. And I can assure you that based on reasoning and the empirical evidence coming out from foundations of physics coming out from the neuroscience of consciousness, it has become extraordinarily unlikely that consciousness is not fundamental. To think of consciousness as secondary or epiphenomenal leads to all kinds of insoluble problems. So there is excellent rational and empirical reason to take consciousness as at least one of if not the only fundamental building block of nature. Physics is fundamentally a science of perception. It's an attempt to account for the patterns and regularities of the world we perceive. It does not attempt to transcend perception. Even when physicists use instruments like telescopes, microscopes, oscilloscope's, or whatever-a-scopes you want, the output of these instruments still needs to be perceived. So everything in physics gets filtered out through the paradigm of perception, so to say. Physics is a science of perception. Therefore it does not make any attempt to see fundamentally beyond the physical or fundamentally beyond matter, because physicality and matter are just other words for the world we perceive, for the contents of perception. Life is the instrument for its own understanding. To understand life you don't unplug from life. You don't unplug from that which you're trying to understand. What you do is you pay attention to what's happening, try to capture the nuance. Ask yourself, "What is this about? Why is this happening? What does this mean?" Life in the world is a book to be read and deciphered. But we may get so caught up in an understandable need to suffer less, that we forget to read the book. We forget to pay attention. While the book is the key to its own decipherment. If you decipher the book of life you will automatically suffer less, but you can't decipher it if you're not with your eyes on the ball, if you're not paying attention. Life is the tool to its own understanding. All the great religious and spiritual traditions were founded on this understanding. Namely that the there is one infinite and indivisible reality which shines in each of us, as the experience "I am" and which appears to us as the world. In other words there is an ocean of being so to speak, that underlies everyone and everything from which everyone and everything derives its existence. In which everyone and everything lives, and into which it vanishes and disappears. And this is really the founding principle of all the great religious traditions, this the recognition of the the unity of Being. The first Hermetic principle is that "The all is mind, the universe is mental." Wherever we look is the one mind. As Rumi said, "Wherever I look, there is the face of God." Whether we peer into the micro world or into the macrocosm of space, we find the one mind. Here is an image of human neurons, and this is a simulated image of Dark Matter distribution throughout the Universe. The Millennium run is a simulation done by the Max Planck Institute using supercomputers to create a representation of the distribution and evolution of dark matter in the universe. Dark Matter forms a vast Cosmic web of interconnected filaments and nodes which is visually almost identical to neurons and the neuropathways found in a human brain. And the same pattern is ubiquitous throughout nature. We can call it the One Mind, or God or simply "all that is". And what is referred to as God is not some external being beyond and prior to the world. God is the the being that shines in each of us as the knowledge "I am" and appears to us as the world. So we could say from this point of view in religious language, the world is the appearance of the word of God, the Logos, and that we are localizations of God's mind within God's mind. So how does one universal field of subjectivity, one universal consciousness, how does it appear to be many? Because I can't read your thoughts, presumably you can't read mine. I don't know what's happening in the galaxy of Andromeda, not even in China. We don't have a full experience of the entirety of nature, so how can this one mind that nature is have these limitations and appear to be many? Well I think we know one natural process that does exactly that. It's called dissociation in psychiatry. It's a process according to which one mind seemingly fragments into multiple disjointed centers of awareness. We have definitive empirical evidence for this in people, in humans, from neuroimaging and now I think we are close to beginning to have an explicit conceptual account of dissociation based on integrated information theory, which is the main theory in the neuroscience of consciousness. When a dissociative boundary forms you can only see what is across that dissociative boundary through perception. And what you then perceive is matter, physicality. In other words matter, physicality, is a conscious appearance of a conscious process from across a dissociative boundary. Whether we describe these processes in terms of modern theories or using ancient models like the five skandhas, what matters is that we make these processes which are usually unconscious, conscious. When they are made conscious then resistance within the self structure can be dropped. The unconscious operation of "I" can be dropped. The perception that we are a physical body, the perception of sensations on the body, the conceptualization of objects and things, the identification with preferences towards those things, and the sense that there is a witness watching all of this, all of these mind processes are to be realized as empty of self. In other words we disidentify from the phenomena while allowing it to be exactly as it is. This is not a turning away from life. Quite the contrary this is a deepening of the intimacy with life. My understanding that consciousness is fundamental and precedes physicality, over the years has fundamentally changed my experience of life in the world and what it means to be a human being alive in the world. To me it happened slowly. At first it was a merely conceptual understanding in my head, and then it sort of sunk into the body and started modulating my emotions, my feelings, and it changes everything. It changes what you consider to be a well-lived life, it changes what you consider to be goals worthy of working towards, it changes your perception of self, it changes your relationship to other living creatures, yeah it does change everything. Personal goals in terms of status, power, money, that has gone away. The awareness that my life is not at all, has never been, and will never be about me, but it's about nature, and I'm just one local manifestation of nature, that understanding leads to a profound relaxation of that anxiety that comes with the need to achieve certain personal goals or with the disappointment that comes when you don't reach those personal goals. All that stuff has gone. I live life now as a form of service to Nature. I'm open to doing whatever it is that nature wants to do through me and although that may sound like being bonded to service like a slave it doesn't feel like that. It feels like I no longer have the oppressive overwhelming responsibility to make myself personally happy. Which is the most oppressive idea that the human mind can have, which is that your life is about you and therefore you have the responsibility to be happy so when you fail on that it's your failure and then you start regretting it. No, that has gone. It has disappeared. That's one of the things that changed in my life. A deeper understanding of reality is directly conducive to empathy, to mutual respect, to non egoic purposes. It's conducive to less addictive patterns of behavior. So there is absolutely no doubt that if humanity's understanding were deeper and more pervasive, life would definitely be better. The solution to the world's problems is to recognize the true source of the problems, which is the ego that operates only for its own interest. It doesn't matter what the ego engages with; politics, religion, economics, or education. As long as it operates from the false premise that there is a separate "I", then we will continue to perpetuate suffering and separation. The only solution for humanity now is to wake up. In Buddhism, when there is no longer a sense of self as a separate thing, and at the same time, no other than Self, it is nirvana, the cessation of self-centered activity, the cessation of delusion, the cessation of dreaming, and the waking up from the character in the dream of life. The Bible says the Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. The Word is is often translated as Logos, which is an ancient word with a profound meaning. The logos is associated with eternity, Truth and direct revelation. You could say that it is through the Logos or through Christ Consciousness, or Buddha nature that God's mind is made known.