Keep your body relaxed and sit with no effort whatsoever,
With a gentle smile and let your eyes shut.
There is nothing to do,
Only be effortlessly.
And see the intelligence in you is already responding to this invitation.
And let the river that is made of experiences flow,
Flow on its own.
And as you sit on the bank of the river,
Open and empty,
See that none of your senses need any management or any control.
Can you see that all the experiences are reporting to your presence?
Can you see that experiences are coming and going?
They flow like a river,
But you,
The presence,
Remain here,
Constantly.
See yourself thus as a witnessing awareness.
You,
The awareness,
Can remain without getting entangled in shapes,
Colors of experiences.
Simply by being in awareness as awareness.
And now,
In your humanly curiosity,
You may be trying to see and find that awareness.
But remember that whatever is visible is also an experience reporting to awareness.
What your imagination is seeing or calling awareness is a form,
An experience.
It is important to have this distinction,
At this stage of your journey especially,
To clearly understand the nature of awareness.
In other words,
Whatever is visible is not consciousness.
Object is not the subject.
Awareness,
The subject,
The presence,
Does the work of seeing and sensing.
And just like you can't see your eyes,
You can't see awareness,
Because you yourself are awareness.
There is no distance between awareness and you.
Thus,
There is no way you can see your awareness like you can see other objects.
The word awareness signifies knowing and being.
Aware means to know and ness suggests being of something.
The knowing presence is awareness.
If you experientially understand just this one word,
Awareness,
You will touch the highest teaching of all great religions and spiritual traditions.
Be this knowing presence.
Be this awareness.
But without any effort.
Now let's experientially understand the word understanding.
When someone tells you a joke,
And at the end of the joke,
The punchline is delivered.
And there is this timeless micropause in which the meaning of the joke is understood.
You all would have also experienced this micropause when trying to understand something.
Or when the actual understanding takes place.
This understanding is not a thought or emotion.
For example,
The punchline is heard or known as an object.
And the laughter or smile is experienced as an object.
But the understanding that took place in the middle of the punchline and the laughter is not an object.
It is not a thought or emotion either.
And it is in the innocence of the word understanding,
Which seem to imply understanding takes place underneath the surface of experiences.
The same phenomenon of understanding happens when you are studying something or when you want to know something.
When this phenomenon of knowing or understanding happens,
It always happens beyond thought or any object.
You will never be able to grasp this phenomenon of knowing or understanding in mind or in your senses.
But it happens timelessly.
When Archimedes stopped thinking and let go of his problems,
He was able to find the solution to his problems.
And similarly,
Einstein has allegedly said that 99% of his thoughts do not achieve anything.
But something happens between thoughts,
Which is beyond the thoughts.
And that is the secret of his inventions.
And when you would assess your own phenomenon of knowing,
It appears more like a nominal experience,
Not an objective experience,
Or an observable phenomenon,
Nominal in its nature.
It appears that whatever your awareness touches,
It knows.
Whatever appears in your awareness is known and is known instantly.
This knowing is a very common occurrence.
It happens every moment.
The word attention is derived from two Latin words.
A means towards and tendere means to stretch.
When you pay attention to something,
The word signifies that you are stretching your awareness,
Your consciousness to that object and touching it with your awareness.
And in this touching,
You know the object.
The Sanskrit word dhyan also means attention.
The word is also made of dhi meaning awareness or consciousness and yana meaning moving towards,
Moving forward.
When you pay attention to something,
It is as if the awareness moves towards the thing,
Touches it and knows it.
There is a lot of inner wisdom in these seemingly simple daily words.
Whatever comes in the light of awareness is known.
This knowing is the essential basis of all our experiences.
And as you know,
Everything is an experience.
Thoughts,
Feelings,
Knowledge of five senses,
Sensation of the body,
Anything and everything is nothing but an experience.
And the experience is lived only when they are known.
Known in awareness,
Known by awareness.
So the word awareness signifies knowing and being.
The knowing presence is awareness.
The essence of all our experiences.
The essence of life and living.
So be this awareness without any effort.
