There are many reasons for why we turn to exploring the big existential questions through the apparent course of life. Maybe its an impulse towards truth, freedom, and wholeness that we recognise. For many of us, the movement towards the deep exploration into the nature of existence and our own identity is driven by the recognition that, no matter what we are experiencing in the ‘outside world’, internally we are feeling a sense of disconnection, a lack of fulfillment, fear, and ultimately an incredibly painful sense of separation that cannot be satiated through doership, relationships, sensations, and ‘things’.
We are no longer able to ignore the background angst. Despite the incredible level of discomfort experienced when we surrender to this, it is in fact the doorway to our deepest sense of all that we have been seeking. The core sense of separation is beginning to become the foreground of our experience, working as a director for the mind to explore the nature of itself.
When we are experiencing that sense of loneliness, rejection, or disconnection, what is needed is not to try to fix, change, find or get love,
but rather to expand our understanding of what love is. This is synonymous to experiencing, directly, what we are.
Exploring the nature of experience, of presence itself, invites us into this exploration, guiding us to recognise that nothing outside ourselves is responsible for the love, peace, and fulfillment we seek. This is grounded in the fundamental, self-evident truth, which can only be experienced as we explore directly this present moment, that there is indeed no inner and outer world, and that this apparent division is only created by the conceptualising mind. We begin to see more and more clearly, the way in which the imagination, which labels our experience, divides experience, creates an apparent obstruction between ‘myself and the love that I seek’. The truth is, you ARE the love that you seek. You are its source. Love is what you are made of. The challenge is not to try to find love, but to recognise that the separate entity that you believe yourself to be is indeed simply this, a belief, a self-concept that clouds the truth of what you really are, what the world is, and indeed, what love is.
The Illusion of External Sources
The world as we typically perceive it is seen through a lens of separation. We are conditioned to believe in a division between the self and others, the observer and the observed, the internal world of experience and the external world of objects and relationships. This perspective fosters the belief that love and its associated feelings of peace and joy are qualities that we need to seek and find outside ourselves. However, this is a fundamental misinterpretation of our actual experience.
"The basis of spirituality is that what this event is, what is happening here, is radically and conceivably drastically different than what people think"
Peter Brown, The Yoga of Radiant Presence
This statement points to the discrepancy between our lived experience and our interpretations of it. The external world, with all its objects and relationships, is not separate from us but is a manifestation of our own consciousness.
Recognizing the Source of everything (Love)
This recognition starts with a simple shift in perspective—seeing that all experiences, including the feeling of love, arise from within your own field of consciousness. This doesn't imply that love is merely a subjective feeling disconnected from the world but rather that the world itself, and our experience of love within it, is a seamless expression of our own being.
Practical Pointers for Recognition
1. Direct Inquiry into Experience: Begin by directly inquiring into your present experience. Notice the sensations, feelings, and perceptions that constitute your experience of love or the absence of it. Recognize that these experiences are appearing in your consciousness and are not coming from a source outside of you.
2. Noticing the Unchanging Presence: Observe the unchanging presence within which all experiences come and go. This presence is your fundamental nature—unchanging, radiant, and complete. It is the source of all love, not something to be found in the fluctuating realm of external phenomena.
3. Dissolving Dualities: Practice dissolving the perceived dualities between self and other, inside and outside. As you do so, you begin to see love not as something to be acquired but as the very nature of your being, inseparably connected to the fabric of reality.
4. Cultivating Sensitivity to Presence: Cultivate a sensitivity to the presence of your own experience, recognizing it as the ground of all that you perceive and feel. This sensitivity allows you to appreciate the intrinsic value and inherent perfection of every moment, beyond the binding of concepts, recognizing love in its most subtle forms. (see blog article: The structures of the separate self and movements of mind – why is it so hard to ‘stay present’?)
5. Engagement without Attachment: Engage with the world without attachment to outcomes. This practice allows you to express love freely, without the constriction of needing the external world to reflect it back to you in specific ways.
The journey toward recognizing yourself as the source of love and all that arises can feel like a total reorientation and disorientation of your entire world as you recognise the nature of your being. It is a shift from seeking love in the transient and apparently separate and external world to recognizing it as your very nature. The more that we pay attention to, through the felt sense, our own being, we discover that the love we seek has always been here, within us, radiantly present and unconditionally available.
POINTER: The experience of the separate self, the built world in mind, has largely been built around ideas that "love is not here and I am not that". This isn't true, but the experience of feeling and associated energetics within the bodymind system have built up around this over the course of our life and so when we begin to explore our present experience, these feelings and beliefs are given permission to come to the surface. This can feel really uncomfortable and distressing and likely this works as the primary function of why the mind pulls away from experiencing the moment directly, to pull away from the pain. This is totally innocent and requires support.
I do not recommend sitting with these feelings on your own. I have personally spent almost three years exploring the nature of my experience in nondual therapy on a weekly basis, and there were many feelings that would not rise to the surface, or that the bodymind transferred into physical pain, because my nervous system was developing the capacity to feel into the depths of my felt experience. I recommend first, coming to know presence and the ground of being (sacred safety) directly as the ground for this exploration which you can do through one to one support in a nonduality informed therapeutic container, and also through exploring your experience in the natural world.
See blog articles: Presence as the Radiant Parent: Nature and Need; AND Exploring Sacred Safety: How Re-parenting to Presence Connects with the Infinite Self; AND The Qualities of True Nature: Finding Freedom within Suffering AND The Food of Life, Energy in Consciousness, and The Gift of The Gunas
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