Awareness is not a state. It is that on which states appear. You cannot experience awareness itself because you are awareness, yet everything you experience is in awareness.
The beauty of awareness not being a state, is that you cannot loose it. In fact, you have never been without it. You don't have to do anything to have it, it is already yours.
The reflection of enlightenment in awareness, however, may change what is experienced. An enlightened mind may experience life differently: the absence of suffering, or less frustration with the way things are.
When one first gets a glimpse of oneness, the mind may feel an overwhelming bliss, or ecstasy, but bliss will not last. It is a great experience, but it is not permanent, and it is not enlightenment. When it goes, one may be rather dismayed, yet if one can take the experience as a pointer, it may lead to the understanding that is enlightenment.
With or without that blissful experience, you are awareness. Enlightened or not, you are awareness. You can't feel awareness directly. It is a potentiality, a constant, eternal readiness for experience.
Awareness is the foundation, the potentiality, for knowing, for experiencing, any and all things - however gross or subtle. It is the field in which interpretations of experience are labeled good or bad.
Enlightenment then, if not a state, can be nothing but understanding - understanding of the fact of non-duality. Those who understand we call enlightened. Yet all, with or without understanding, are awareness, and are standing in non-duality.
Experience is experience, it does not necessarily translate into knowledge. And it is knowledge that is required for enlightenment. Enlightenment is not getting something you didn't have, it is the realization that you are that - eternal awareness, waiting, ready for anything.
In enlightenment, you realize that the ordinary is okay. You do not need what is not in the world, you know that whatever is out there, or not out there, does not affect you. Your happiness is not out there, and seeking for self has ended.
Showing posts with label bliss. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bliss. Show all posts
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Sunday, January 11, 2009
The Brain Bliss
When I don't have to go to work, and I have a good night's sleep, I often awake with a physical sense of bliss in my brain. I like the feeling of it.
It feels physical. It's as if I feel directly my whole physical brain inside my skull, and the feeling is exquisite. It's peaceful, it's just plain goodness.
This doesn't happen on week days when I wake to the alarm and have to transition into going to work. There is no space in that mode for sleeping in, laying till the body-mind is rested.
It makes one wonder what the modern world and its slavery to time has done to our natural state. J. Krishnamurti got it right when he talked about the violence of every day life. There is a violence to time, an imposition on the natural state.
This waking to physical bliss in the brain is something that just happens. I don't look for it; don't expect it. It just happens, and when it does, I always have a good day. Everything goes slow and easy.
What is it? I don't know.
It feels physical. It's as if I feel directly my whole physical brain inside my skull, and the feeling is exquisite. It's peaceful, it's just plain goodness.
This doesn't happen on week days when I wake to the alarm and have to transition into going to work. There is no space in that mode for sleeping in, laying till the body-mind is rested.
It makes one wonder what the modern world and its slavery to time has done to our natural state. J. Krishnamurti got it right when he talked about the violence of every day life. There is a violence to time, an imposition on the natural state.
This waking to physical bliss in the brain is something that just happens. I don't look for it; don't expect it. It just happens, and when it does, I always have a good day. Everything goes slow and easy.
What is it? I don't know.