Awareness Alone: The Path of Enquiry

There is one indivisible real substance that is absolutely aware. No-one has ever been able, or will ever be able, to prove that anything exists outside it. It is literally all that you and I can ever be. Understanding that there is no Other, beyond endless becoming born of desire and fear, we should accept ourselves as eternal awareness alone.

The goals of this factual text are specific: (1) To affirm the utter transparency of ourselves as effortless existence-awareness. (2) To affirm the world's manifestations as nothing but organs and conditions of borderless existence-awareness. (3) To reconcile awareness in its modes of feeling and volition, potential and kinetic. (4) To deconstruct all limiting paradigms: of border, person, ego, name, form, time, space, cause, change, duality, context, body, independent arising, death. (5) To affirm awareness as ever-absorbed, singular, beyond polarised notions of 'subject and object'.

Those who entertain the notion that consciousness is some kind of 'evolutionary product' that 'evolves from unconscious states' without ever offering a single example of how this happens, will resist the proofs in this book: that the absolute condition of existence is consciousness itself, and that 'these words and these worlds' are its eternal affirmation. Even a cursory summary of our position reveals its absoluteness in that body, senses, feelings and thoughts function effortlessly as expressions of boundless profundity. Meanwhile, our experience at any moment is absolute, never polarised as 'seer and seen', 'self and other'.

The apparent infinite ramification of awareness as ego, sense, feeling, thought, imagination, memory and so forth, prevents us from surrendering in awe at awareness' sole and extraordinary presence. Our confusion lies in the perceived hiatus between absolute receptivity (feeling) and absolute volition (power of concentration), whereby 'awareness is obscured' as ideas and their forms: name, atom, time, space, cause... Observe this pulsing, this 'becoming' of awareness. Without utter receptivity, how could anything be discerned? How can awareness modify where the context is ever itself? And where is the border between limited and limitless? The issue turns on a single question: To whom does any idea, action, displacement (etc) occur? Who is the witness and dancer of all phenomena? We must embrace the necessity for enquiry: our responsibility for suffering and its cause, limitation. All our phantom boundaries, mental conventions entrenched by habit, are exposed as the thieves and dictators that they are. What is ignorant, suffers, is born and dies, is lost? Ego (that seeker, desirer, little 'I', definer, fixator, achiever, phantom gatekeeper, material idea, superimposition) dictates experience, enforcing the lie that 'forms' independently arise, where we drown in relativities, and 'knowledge by inference and labelling' replaces that of identity, and our obsessively-built personae amount to no more than cardboard cutouts. Beyond self- distraction, beyond the clamour to build an ideational machine paradise, beyond endless fear that we will cease to be, our rock and role is to be as we are. Peace is the goal, a permanent security beyond the see-saw of need, dependency and dissatisfaction. Yet there's no patience, no surrender, without understanding. To deconstruct brings us detachment, which opens the way to an effortless joy. We then wear the world's jewels lightly, knowing them to be the very delight of the Supreme. While we ever appear to act, we don't cling to action's seeds and consequences. We become transparent, simple, ever now, ever here, borderless, eternal.

Australian author, educator, director, composer and yoga teacher. His fiction and non-fiction works address core psychological and philosophic dilemmas.