The Offering of Life
Nondual awareness is the recognition that the ultimate experiential reality is not the external world, nor the streams of thought, nor the feelings in the body, but awareness itself. Awareness is that in which all perceptions, conceptions, and feelings arise and dissolve. Awareness is not something we have; awareness is what we are.
Having undertaken the investigation and gained the recognition, we can be open to the possibility, since the nature of awareness is so elusive, that the presence of awareness is of a “divine*” [see footnote] nature. In a nondual context, “divine” does not imply a fundamentally separate entity existing externally that merges with a personal body-mind. Rather, the divine presence is already the indwelling, untarnishable perfection of awareness itself. It is like a miracle hiding in plain sight.
We cannot know what is beyond conceptual thinking by using conceptual thinking, but we can know with certainty that we are aware. Whatever is happening, whatever this is, is not nothing. Something is happening here, and that something is known by a knower, by awareness.
When the divine presence of “I am aware” is understood to be the perceptual lens through which the supreme creative intelligence experiences the world of subject-object relationships, reality becomes imbued with mystery and meaning.
Awareness is the only reality to which we have direct access. Awareness, our most intimate experience, is what we are on the most fundamental level. We can honor this ineffable, divine source by seeing daily life, whether folding clothes, walking in nature, or speaking with a friend, as an opportunity to rest knowingly in and as the essence of being.
To be knowingly aware of the sacred presence of awareness is to be reborn, in a sense, into our true nature. Here, we live free, from our center, as our true self.