If you’re of adult age, you’ve probably experienced a fair amount in life.
You’ve probably fallen in love, and maybe out of love again, at least once.
You’ve probably been to school, witnessed or been the victim of bullying.
You’ve undoubtedly experienced a loss of some kind, whether it be someone close to you, or loss of a valued possession.
You’ll have most certainly have experienced many different emotions; such as happiness, sadness, anger, embarrassment, longing etc.
Through all these experiences, what has been the one thing that has remained constant?
If you said your “thoughts”, then we know this isn’t true, your thoughts come and go like clouds. Sure you experience many thought over and over, these form beliefs that shape your life, but they do still come and go. You’re not thinking the same thing all the time.
If you said your “emotions”, then again these are constantly in flux.
If you said your “behaviours”, then again these have changed as you’ve grown and unless you do exactly the same thing all the time, they are constantly changing as you undertake different tasks.
So what is the one constant, that has shared every second of every day?
The answer to this is the “awareness” in which all experiences unfold. The “presence” that watches, listens and is.
This presence can be described as consciousness, awareness, or even space. It is the space into which all life unfolds, but it isn’t empty space. It isn’t a vacuum of nothing, but it a space of “NO THING”.
You can not view it in the same way you can your mind constructed self. The self you describe when someone asks you, who you are.
I am [whatever age you are],
I am a male or female
I am a professional whatever
I am a father, mother, daughter son, only child
Whatever you label yourself as being, is not really who you are.
This labelled self is your mind constructed identity, used to tell stories about, to describe, to understand, to point to, but it isn’t the real you.
You look at a flower and you call it a flower, you have a mind constructed idea of what as flower is, what it should look like, where you should find it.
In the same way you do with anything you’ve ever experienced.
You label it, so it can understand it, and your mind does the same with its version of you.
When you say I’m trying to find myself, this is a false way of thinking about it. The real you, can’t be observed, or lost like an object because you can’t removed yourself from it. “You are it” and “it is you”. You can’t do anything other than “be who you are”.
It’s not about finding yourself, it’s about losing everything that mentally and emotionally blocks your realisation of the truth, that all the constructed versions of yourself are not you. The real you is what’s left when all the labels are stripped away.
You are awareness, presence, the space in which all experiences play out, without the layer of thought and interpretation getting in the way. The space that just is, without any need to add anything else. You are consciousness.
I love these two quotes that say it all…
“Thoughts are like clouds, you are the sky. ”
“You are the Universe, experiencing itself from infinite points of view. ”
That means you and I, and all life are connected because we are all a manifestation of the Universe experiencing itself.