If awareness were likened to an ocean, thoughts would be the waves that play on the surface and feelings the currents that flow within it. Just as all there is to the waves and currents is the movement or activity of the ocean, so all there is to the mind is the motion or activity of awareness.
It is always still in the depths of the ocean; likewise, the heart of awareness is always silent and at peace.
For this reason, all the mind has to do to find the peace for which it longs is to sink into the heart of awareness. As Rumi said, ‘Flow down and down in ever-widening rings of being.’*
As a wave or current flows ‘down and down’ into the depths of the ocean, it loses its agitation and ‘widens’ until at some point it comes to rest. Having no activity or motion there, the wave or current has lost its form and, as a result, its limitations.
The wave and the current do not disappear. They never existed in their own right to begin with. The wave and the current are simply the movement of water.
The water doesn’t appear when the waves and currents appear, and it doesn’t disappear when they subside. Nothing new comes into existence when the wave and current appear, and nothing is removed from existence when they disappear.
Likewise, as the mind sinks progressively into its essence it quietens and expands – that is, it is divested of all that is finite, conditioned or limited within it – and stands revealed to itself as its essential, irreducible essence: clear, luminous, silent awareness.
When the waves of the mind rise in the form of thoughts, images, feelings, sensations and perceptions, nothing new appears, and when they subside, nothing real disappears.
As it says in Chapter 2, verse 20 of the Bhagavad Gita, ‘That which is never ceases to be; that which is not never comes into existence.’
Just as the waves that play on the surface of the ocean and the currents that flow within it are only the formless water moving within itself, so all thinking, imagining, feeling, sensing and perceiving are only awareness vibrating within itself, appearing to itself as the multiplicity and diversity of objective experience, but never ceasing to be or know anything other than itself.
Each of our minds is an apparent limitation of infinite awareness. Just as a wave or current gives the formless ocean a temporary appearance, so each of our minds gives unlimited awareness a provisional limit, and thus a temporary name and form.
The finite mind is the activity that infinite awareness freely assumes in order to bring manifestation into apparent existence. In assuming the form of the finite mind, infinite awareness seems to limit itself and, as such, becomes a separate subject of experience, from whose point of view it is able to know itself as a separate object, other or world.
Meditation is the reversal of this process. When the activity of the finite mind subsides, nothing happens to awareness; it simply loses a temporary name and form.
It is for this reason that in the Tantric tradition of Kashmir Shaivism it is said that the path by which we fall is the path by which we climb. The pathway through which infinite awareness assumes the form of the finite mind is the same pathway, traversed in the opposite direction, through which the finite mind loses its limitations and stands revealed as infinite awareness.
In doing so it is gradually, in most cases, but occasionally suddenly, divested of the limitations that it freely assumed in the first place in order to manifest creation.
The Direct Path – the pathless path of self-investigation, self-abidance or self-surrender – is the means by which the finite mind is divested of its freely assumed limitations until its essential, irreducible, indivisible, indestructible and imperturbable nature of pure awareness stands revealed to itself as it is.
At no point, either in the outward process of manifestation or the inward path of returning to its essence of infinite awareness, does a finite mind ever come into existence in its own right.
There is no such entity as a finite mind or a separate self. A finite mind is the freely assumed activity of infinite awareness, through which and as which awareness knows itself as the world. The finite mind is thus the agency of God’s infinite being, never an entity in its own right.
There is only one reality – one infinite, indivisible, self-aware being with nothing in itself other than itself with which it could be limited or from which it could be separated – from which all apparent objects and selves derive their seeming existence.
Infinite awareness never ceases being infinite awareness in order to become a finite mind. It just colours itself with its own activity and appears to limit itself. There is just awareness and the colouring of awareness but never the absence of awareness, nor the existence of any other mind or self.
A wave cannot find peace and fulfilment in another wave. The only way for it to find lasting peace and fulfilment is to sink into the depths of itself, thereby progressively losing its agitation.
Likewise, the only place in which an apparently separate self or finite mind can find lasting peace and fulfilment is in the depths of its own being. The separate self or finite mind that longs for peace and fulfilment in objective experience is like a current in the ocean in search of water.
Although the search for peace and fulfilment is temporarily alleviated by the acquisition of an object, substance, activity, state of mind or relationship, it is never fully satisfied and, as a result, resurfaces as soon as the new experience ceases or disappears.
It is only when the apparently separate self or finite mind dives deep within itself that it finds the rest, the peace and the fulfilment for which it longs.
The finite mind or separate self is an illusion that is seemingly real only from its own illusory perspective. However, this does not mean that the finite mind or separate self does not exist. It simply means that it is not what it appears to be.
All illusions have a reality to them, and if we are experiencing an illusion we are, by definition, experiencing its reality. It is not possible to watch a movie without seeing the screen.
The ‘I’ of the separate self is the true and only ‘I’ of infinite awareness, seemingly mixed with and, therefore, apparently limited by the objective qualities of experience.
With this apparent limitation of awareness comes a limiting of the peace that is inherent within it. It is for this reason that the primary motivation of all apparently separate selves is to find peace or fulfilment.
The wound of separation that lives in the hearts of most people is an invitation from the heart of awareness, drawing the mind inwards to the peace and fulfilment that live at its source and essence.
Just as attention or mind is awareness directed towards an object, so our longing or devotion is love directed towards a person or god. And just as the peace and happiness which the mind desires live at the source of attention, never at its destiny, so the love for which the heart longs resides at the origin of its longing, never in its fulfilment.
As such, our longing originates from and is made out of the very substance for which it longs. In the words of a sixteenth-century Italian monk, ‘Lord, Thou art the love with which I love Thee.’
The returning of attention to its source is the essence of meditation; the dissolving of devotion or longing in its origin is the heart of prayer.
The mind that seeks peace and happiness and the heart that longs for love must subside or dissolve in their essence.
We must die before we die.
In being aware of being aware, there is no room for a separate self. There is just eternal, infinite awareness, resting in and as its own inherently peaceful, unconditionally fulfilled being…knowing, being and loving itself alone.
It is for this reason that Rumi said, ‘In the existence of your love, I become non-existent. This non-existence linked to you is better than anything I ever found in existence.’
In being aware of being aware – the knowing of our own essential, irreducible being – the mind loses its agitation and the heart is relieved of its yearning.
What remains cannot be given a name, for all names refer to the objects of knowledge and experience, and yet it is that for which all minds seek and all hearts long.
* Translated by Coleman Barks.