1)---Let’s go directly to the source of our being
2)--- Let’s go directly to the source of our being. Just for a moment set aside your story – all your ideas, sensations, and perceptions of a personal self, of who you think you are. This includes your gender, age, body type, relationships, career, likes and dislikes, successes and failures, hopes, dreams, fears, and memories. Set aside all concepts, beliefs, opinions, positions, and theories of what you think and feel to be right or wrong, good or bad. Gently set all of these to one side and then notice what’s left.
3)---Space?
Emptiness?
Nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
Yet if we were to ask our-self the question, do I exist? We would immediately answer yes. We wouldn’t have to refer to anything to arrive at this answer. We just know this as an irrefutable fact. We know intuitively that even without all of our stuff that we are present and aware – that our essential being is an aware presence. If there’s any doubt, we can check this out any time in our own experience. You will always come up with the same answer: If I set aside all that I think that I am, I am left with nothing, an emptiness, yet I know that I exist, that I am present and aware.
4)--- Stay with this sense of being. Don’t add anything extra. And as we abide as this aware presence, let’s examine its qualities.
5)--- Can we find a beginning to this aware presence? A place where something else stops and awareness begins? Can we find an end to it? A specific place where awareness stops and something else begins? The answer to both questions is obviously no.
6)--- There is no indication whatsoever, no experiential evidence, that awareness has a beginning or an end, a birth or a death. In other words, it’s timeless, or beyond time. One word for that is eternal.
7)--- Can we find a boundary to this aware presence? Expanding in all directions, can we find an edge, a border – a place where awareness stops and something else begins? It appears as though awareness goes on forever, is limitless, or in other words, infinite.
8)--- Don’t believe a word of this. ''Look for yourself''. Experience for our-self whether or not there are any limits to our essential being as this so-called aware presence.
9)---If, in fact, we do experience the limitless, timeless qualities of this aware presence that appears to be who and what we are at the core of our being, ask our-self the question: If my awareness, or consciousness, has no beginning and no end, no edge or boundary, is outside of time and goes on forever, in other words, is eternal and infinite, where is there room for two of them?
10)--- If something fills up all space and time, better yet, goes beyond all space and time, it has to be everywhere. No room for two.
11)--- There’s just one thing going on, and you, I, we, all things, are IT.