The body appears in the mind as a series of sensations and perceptions, and the mind is a vibration of awareness. As such, the body is not something solid made out of matter but a condensation or localisation of and in awareness.
In order to effect this condensation or localisation, the unlimited, space-like presence of awareness must contract or collapse within itself. This contraction is an activity of awareness, and its maintenance requires energy. The contraction of awareness into a finite mind exerts a tension on itself which is always seeking to be relieved, just as the compression of a rubber ball sets up an inevitable tension that is always trying to expand or relax into its original neutral condition. This contraction of awareness is felt as the experience of suffering, and the inexorable force toward the natural state of equilibrium is felt as the desire for freedom, peace and happiness.
Thus, the desire for happiness is simply the mind’s desire to be divested of its limitations and returned to its inherently relaxed, peaceful condition of eternal, unlimited awareness. The search for enlightenment is simply a refinement of the desire for happiness. It is an indication that the search has become conscious rather than simply instinctive.
All human beings retain the memory of their own eternity within themselves, and it is for this reason that everyone without exception is motivated to seek freedom, peace, happiness and love above all else. Just as the screen is still visible in the image, and the echo of the Big Bang is said to be still discernible in the universe in the form of cosmic background radiation, so the original nature of awareness, which is peace, happiness and freedom itself, is discernible throughout all the mind’s activities. The intuition of happiness is the echo of our true nature reverberating in the finite mind.
Every drop of water is a temporary name and form of the ocean. Although every drop is unique in terms of name and form, each one carries the same essential taste of the ocean. Likewise, every moment of experience is a temporary colouring of awareness, each moment unique in itself but carrying the same essential taste. The longing for happiness that lives in the hearts of all apparently separate selves is the desire to savour this one taste.
Awareness seems to overlook or forget itself in order to take the form of manifestation, but even in its apparent forgetting or veiling of itself it retains the memory of its own original nature. This memory, which expresses itself as the desire for happiness, is the pull of our original nature filtering through all forms of experience. It is an expression of the innate and inexorable force that exists in awareness itself to return again and again to its original, unconditioned, inherently peaceful and unconditionally fulfilled nature. It is for this reason that the desire for happiness eclipses all other desires. To find happiness is the ultimate purpose of human existence.
* * *
It is not in fact the human being that desires happiness. The human experience is a flow of mind – a spectrum of experience ranging from the subliminal states of the collective and personal ‘unconscious’ to the more clearly defined and sharply focused forms of the waking state. Each mind is a pulsating flux of energies through which, in which and as which awareness realises a segment of its infinite possibilities, and is thus a partial actualisation of itself. The individual mind is the agency by which awareness seems to become a separate subject of experience, from whose perspective it is able to know objective experience. As such, duality is the mechanism of creation.
However, this partial actualisation of awareness involves a trade-off: awareness must consent to limit itself in order to realise a segment of its infinite potential. In doing so, it allows its nameless, formless being to assume a name and a form. Through this consent, being appears as existence. In order to bring manifestation out of being and into existence, the infinite contracts into the finite. The tension that is created by this contraction is the longing for happiness.
From the point of view of the individual, happiness is something it desires for its own sake. Little does the individual realise that the desire for happiness is simply an equal and opposite force seeking to relax or dissolve the tensions that are inherent in the limiting of awareness from which it derives its apparent existence. The individual does nothing. It doesn’t even have a status of its own. It is an activity, not an entity.
The entire existence of the apparently separate self or finite mind and the world that it perceives is a play in and of awareness. Awareness itself breathes the world into apparent existence at the expense of its own innate happiness. In doing so it seems to become so intimately merged with every aspect of its creation as to lose itself in it, and then it reclaims that happiness as its dissolves its self-assumed limitations and returns to itself. It is as though awareness breathes the separate self out of itself on the exhale, which is immediately followed by the natural impulse to draw in its breath.
The desire for happiness is the gravitational pull of our true nature on itself when it has lost itself in its own imagination. It is the pull from our true nature of perfectly free and inherently fulfilled awareness on the limitations of the finite mind. From the point of view of the individual, this pull is felt as desire or longing. However, that is said as a concession to the apparent individual from whose imaginary point of view it seems to have an independent existence of its own. In reality, no such separate self ever comes into existence, and therefore there is no question of such a self returning to its true nature.
It is because the screen is present everywhere in the movie that it can never appear as a specific object in the movie and seems, from the point of view of a character in the movie, to be lost in it and therefore missing. Likewise, it is because awareness pervades all experience so intimately and homogeneously that it can never become a particular object of experience, and thus, from the point of view of the apparently separate self or finite mind from whose perspective experience is known, seems to be missing.
Awareness only seems to be missing because it is so completely present in all aspects of its creation that it cannot be distinguished from it. From its own point of view, there is nothing in awareness other than awareness itself, and therefore there is no question of ever experiencing its own absence. Awareness seems to be nowhere because it is everywhere. It seems to be nothing because it is everything.
Once awareness has apparently veiled itself by freely assuming the limitations of the body, it seems to cut itself off from the knowing of its own innate peace and happiness. That is why the apparently separate self feels a wound at the heart of its being, a sense that something is missing or has been lost. It is for this reason that John Bunyan said that God enters the soul through a wound. This wound initiates the search for happiness which is the defining characteristic of the separate self.
The separate self is not an entity; it is the activity of this search. The separate self does not feel this wound; it is this wound. It is not the self that moves towards God; it is God that attracts the self. The movement of the self towards happiness is called desire; the pull on the self from happiness is called grace. As the sixteenth-century Italian monk realised, ‘Lord, Thou art the love with which I love Thee.’
When the individual realises that its entire experience is always tending to return to its natural condition, it realises that it does nothing. Its desire for happiness is simply its response to God’s invitation to return, the grace that is the inevitable pull of awareness acting on itself whenever it seems to have forgotten or overlooked its true nature.
The repeated impulse to return to its natural condition may be initiated in the life of the separate self or finite mind by an object, person or teaching whose sole purpose is to effect the dissolution of the finite mind into its infinite source, and may take place on many different timescales: at the end of every thought or perception, at the end of every day and at the end of every lifetime.
* * *
Long before I was able to articulate this clearly, I had my first intuition of it, as indeed most people do, although this intuition is often overlooked for lack of proper guidance. A couple of years after the crisis at school described in Chapter 5, I found myself living on the edge of Bodmin Moor, in southwest England, apprenticed to one of the founding fathers of the studio pottery movement in the latter half of the twentieth century. Michael Cardew was an old Zen master: cantankerous and irascible on the one hand, warm-hearted and kind on the other. Coupled with a ruthless and penetrating intellect, this made him a disarming and formidable character, which for a young, idealistic man seeking meaning outside the parameters for which his education had thus far prepared him, was an intoxicating and irresistible invitation.
However, it came at a price: life on the edge of Bodmin Moor was solitary and spartan – perhaps intolerably so, were it not for the solace of a friend. But I had a friend. Every Friday evening after dinner I would walk a mile or so up the lane into the village, and call her from the phone box which stood on a small triangle of grass at a junction in the road that led across the moor. That Friday evening, like so many before, I walked up to the phone box seeking refuge. Everything I needed to know was contained in her greeting. I didn’t hear anything after that.
Even as I walked down the hill, I intuited that the dilemma that had appeared to me at school a few years earlier had now taken on a new dimension and was about to intensify. The question as to what aspect of the mind’s knowledge could be relied upon was no longer simply of interest; it had gripped me. This was no longer just about knowledge; it was about happiness. I felt it as a burning in my body, before it was rationalised in my mind. It would be many years before I realised that the search for understanding in my study of the Vedantic teaching, for beauty in my studio as an artist and for happiness and love in intimate relationships was the same quest.
That burning initiated a profound investigation into the nature of happiness, its source and the means by which it might be attained. If someone or something can at one time be a source of happiness and at another a source of suffering, in whom or in what can one reliably invest the desire to be happy? Without realising it, in that brief phone call, I had been given the greatest gift one can ever receive: the intense desire to find out the nature of lasting, unconditional happiness, and its source.
In theory, only one such experience should be required to make it clear that the cause of the heart’s wound is not the absence of any object, state or relationship but rather the forgetting, ignoring or overlooking of our essential nature of ever-present and unlimited awareness, whose nature is peace and happiness itself. But in practice most of us need many such initiations in the form of failed relationships, misfortune, disillusionment or disappointment in order to realise this.
* * *
Just as a spider spins a web out of herself and then lives as a creature within that web, from which she now has to extricate herself, so consciousness imagines the world within itself and then identifies itself as one of the bodies in that world, from whose perspective it now seems to know it. Consciousness seems to become an inside self made of mind living in an outside world made of matter.
Before the spider spins her web, it lies in potential inside her. The moment she spins her web, she becomes a spider that lives in that web, which now seems to be outside and distinct from herself. The spider has been reduced to a fragment, and the web to which she has given birth now seems to be her host. The web and the spider have changed places.
In the same way, the world lies in potential in consciousness. Consciousness generates the world within itself and then, forgetting its true nature, enters its own imagination in the form of a separate self from whose perspective that world may be known. So deep is this amnesia that the separate subject now considers that the world made of matter in which it seems to live is primary and, as a result, that its own essential nature – consciousness – is a by-product of it.
However, the spider that spins out the web and the spider that lives in the web is the same in both cases. Likewise, the infinite ‘I’ of consciousness that generates the world within itself and the personal ‘I’ that seems to live in that world are the same ‘I’. This is why Ramana Maharshi said, ‘When the “I” is divested of the “I”, only “I” remains.’
Having freely given up the knowing of its own eternal, infinite being and assumed the form and therefore the limits of the body, consciousness seems to have become its own prisoner. The prison in which it has incarnated itself is the body, and by doing so it seems to have acquired its limits and destiny.
Prior to this apparent division of itself through the ignoring of its own infinite reality, there is just infinite consciousness being, knowing and loving itself alone. Even during this apparent forgetting there is still only infinite consciousness. It is this infinite consciousness that takes the shape of thoughts, images and feelings on the ‘inside’ and sense perceptions on the ‘outside’, without ever ceasing to be or know itself alone. There is no other substance present in experience.
Why would consciousness freely do such a thing? We cannot give a reason. Any reason would itself be part of manifestation and, as such, part of the objective world for which we were seeking a cause. At best we can say that it is simply an overflowing of itself into manifestation, a sacrifice of its own inherent peace and freedom, an impulse of love in which pure consciousness or God’s infinite being pours itself out into form for no reason, and then, finding itself imprisoned within its own creation, begins the return journey. As Hafiz says, ‘It is an impulse of love for the sake of beauty.’
All apparently separate selves feel that they have free will and that this freedom is theirs by birthright, and for good reason. In the hearts of all apparently separate selves lives the memory of our eternity, the longing for freedom, happiness, peace or love, and it is impossible for that flame to be completely extinguished. The free will that each of us feels is an echo of the freedom of infinite consciousness, the freedom of God’s infinite being. The exercise of that free will in the pursuit of happiness, peace or love is an impulse that cannot be satisfied by anything but the absolute truth and unconditional love.
* * *
By acquiring the limits of the body, consciousness appears to become a fragment and, as such, feels cut off from the whole, incomplete, lacking and alone. As a result, this consciousness-in-the-body entity – the ego or separate self – is in a perpetual state of desire, always seeking to relieve the sense of lack, incompletion and loneliness through the acquisition of objects, substances, activities, states of mind and relationships.
By seeming to share the destiny of the body, consciousness appears to become a temporary entity, subject to birth, change, ageing and death. It is for this reason that the consciousness-in-the-body entity lives with a deep fear of disappearance and death and is almost perpetually trying to allay this fear through emotional defence and resistance.
Thus desire and fear, or seeking and resistance, are the two essential activities around which the ego, separate self or consciousness-in-the-body entity revolves. In fact, the ego is not an entity with its own independent existence; it is the activity of desire and fear. Most people’s lives are, without their realising it, dominated almost entirely by these two existential feelings, which lie for the most part unnoticed below the threshold of the waking-state mind, subliminally influencing most of their thoughts and emotions, and the subsequent activities and relationships that proceed from them.
In fact, most people’s lives are spent avoiding ever having to fully face the discomfort of this existential lack and fear; it is an almost full-time activity that engages people with varying degrees of intensity in a variety of activities, substances and relationships. These strategies of avoidance work to a greater or lesser extent, although even in the most successful lives this existential lack and fear regularly percolate into everyday experience from the unseen depths of the mind, disturbing us with irrational thoughts and unwelcome feelings that are subsequently lived out in our activities and relationships.
To live a life based on the assumption of such an ego or self is to live a life of ignorance – or, in the Christian tradition, sin – a life in which the reality of experience is ignored or denied. A life so lived generates, perpetuates and communicates the ignorance at its core; hence the current state of our world culture, which is almost exclusively dominated by the illusion of separation. The mind/matter divide at the heart of this illusion is the hallmark of materialism and the foundation upon which all conflict and unhappiness are based.
All that the mind needs to do to know its own reality is to cease being exclusively fascinated by the objective elements of its experience – thoughts, feelings, sensations and perceptions – and ask itself instead about the nature of the knowing with which it knows that experience. To find the answer to this question, the mind must turn its knowing or attention away from the objective knowledge that it knows and redirect it towards itself, that is, towards the very knowing with which it knows that knowledge.
When this knowing gives its attention to itself rather than to any finite object or state, it doesn’t find any limitations there. It doesn’t find a finite mind, a limited consciousness. It finds its own nature: original mind. Even to say it ‘finds original mind’ is a concession to conventional language, suggesting that a subject finds or knows an object. This finding is more like a recognition, a divesting of the finite mind of its self-assumed limitations, leaving its original nature – pure consciousness – revealed.
Nothing new is found in this recognition; layers of obscuration only fall away. It is referred to as a recognition because it is not something new that is known; it is rather something that was forgotten that has been remembered. It is a revelation. The word ‘revelation’ comes from the Latin revelare, meaning ‘to lay bare’. It is a laying bare of that which was previously obscured by finite thought and perception. At that timeless moment – timeless because, as the limitations of mind fall away, so time itself dissolves – the apparently finite mind loses its finiteness and thus ceases to be mind, as such. It is revealed as pure consciousness – empty, transparent, dimensionless, objectless, limitless, non-dual, self-aware being.
In all people, under all circumstances and in all situations, the memory of our eternal nature – original mind or pure consciousness – remains alive, however obscured it may seem to be at times. When it seems to be obscured, this memory expresses itself as a longing for truth, happiness, peace, love or beauty. These desires are all facets of a single desire: the mind’s desire to be divested of its self-assumed limitations.
* * *
I recently spent an afternoon walking with my friend Bernardo Kastrup through the streets of Amsterdam, experiencing, as he put it, an aspect of the city that I would not normally encounter on my circuit of non-dual meetings. We walked through a funfair in which groups of teenagers were bungee jumping in capsules; sat for some time in a church in which a mass was taking place; stopped for a drink outside a café; walked through the red light district; and visited one of Amsterdam’s notorious ‘head shops’ before returning to our hotel.
As we walked, I could not help but notice that nearly everyone we encountered seemed to be seeking, in one way or another, to relieve the discomfort of the existential lack and fear that lie as a wound in the hearts of almost all people. As the teenagers plummeted in free-fall from the height of their ascent, they felt the fear of death from the safety of their capsule, and the immense relief from that feeling when they finally came to rest. In this self-imposed initiation rite, they tasted and survived the terror of death and, as a result, felt for a few moments the joy of their own unconditioned existence, before the conditioned mind reasserted its strategies of denial and avoidance and eclipsed the peace and fulfilment that lie at its source. In that brush with death, the teenagers’ existential fear was exposed and fully felt, and in surviving the ordeal they briefly tasted that element in themselves, their essential being, that lies deeper than the ego. The sole purpose of the jump, the brush with death and the exposure of the fear was to artificially induce the taste of their own eternity.
In the enactment of the mass, people were similarly seeking to be released from the limitations of the ego. By surrendering everything in themselves to a higher power, they were, as it were, emptying themselves of the burden of the ego with its train of desire, fear, neurosis, conflict, confusion, doubt and agitation, enabling themselves to savour their essential being, free of conditioning, in all its innocence, purity and peace. Rather than dissolving the ego in its source, such devotional practices expand it beyond its customary limitations, releasing it from its self-contracted state and commending it to God’s infinite being, in which it finds rest and peace. In the words of Isaiah, ‘Thou wilt keep in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on Thee.’
On the cobbled street outside the café, the first few sips of cool beer relax the activity of the mind with which the ego defines and perpetuates itself. As the activity of the mind relaxes, it expands and begins to sink backwards into its source of pure awareness. Even a few steps in this direction are enough to relieve the mind of a degree of its agitation, and as it continues to expand with further sips, it is progressively relieved of the contraction from which the ego derives its identity, affording the mind the fragrance if not the full taste of its own essential nature of peace and freedom. As the person looks around at the activity on the streets of Amsterdam, he does so now as a spectator and not a participant. For a few minutes the relaxation of his mind allows him to stand as the witness of his experience, no longer its accomplice, and as a result he experiences the innate peace and fulfilment of his true nature.
In gazing at an almost naked young woman from the distance of a metre and separated only by a pane of glass, the sense of lack, insufficiency and inadequacy that live at the core of the separate self or ego is exposed and further heightened by the promise of its immediate and gratuitous fulfilment. The subsequent consummation of his desire allows the man to mimic the motions of intimacy without ever having to pay the real price of openness and vulnerability, and at the same time puts a temporary end to the discomfort inherent in his longing, the degree of relief experienced being commensurate with the intensity of the desire evoked. This exposure and fleeting dissolution of the sense of lack that lives at the core of the ego divests the mind temporarily of its limitations, allowing it to plunge, as it were, into its source and taste its essentially unlimited and unconditioned nature, which the man experiences as peace and happiness.
In the head shop, a vast array of mind-altering substances are on offer, all of which promise to relax and expand the mind beyond the prison in which it has located itself and, as a result, to give it a taste of its original, unconditioned and inherently free nature. As the mind relaxes and expands, it travels backwards or inwards through the broader medium of its own field, visiting experiences that are not available to it in the waking state. These experiences give the mind a hint of its own limitless possibilities, of which its waking-state experience is only the narrowest realisation. As the narrow focus of the waking state is relaxed, the distinction between the objects and selves that it experiences becomes less and less clearly defined, and the shared field in which they arise and of which they are but modulations becomes increasingly obvious. The underlying unity of all objects and selves begins to become self-evident. However, attracted by the relative freedom experienced while exploring the broader medium of its own potential, and yet rarely, if ever, glimpsing the absolute freedom of its own inherent nature, the mind becomes addicted to such states and returns to them again and again, seduced by their promise of freedom and simultaneously bound by their limitations.
In all these cases, the person in question wrongly attributes the peace, happiness and freedom briefly experienced to the acquisition of the object, activity, substance, state of mind or relationship and, as a result, when the underlying suffering resurfaces again in between the normal activities of the outward-facing or object-seeking mind, he simply returns to the same objective experience, hoping thereby to experience the same relief, in an ever-deepening cycle of longing, addiction and despair, each time requiring a slightly stronger dose of the object to achieve the desired result.
Unlike the Tantric practitioner, who allows her desire to be aroused but surfs it inwards to fulfilment in its source rather than pursuing it outwards towards the object, substance or state, the seeking mind becomes progressively addicted to the objective experience that seemed to precipitate the brief experiences of peace and happiness.
The finite mind is always seeking to dissolve or expand itself, to divest itself of its limitations and return to its original, unconditioned nature, and thus to taste the peace, happiness and freedom that reside there simply waiting to be recognised.
The essential, irreducible essence of the mind – the absolute truth of experience that shines in each of us as the experience of being aware, the knowledge ‘I am’ or the feeling of love, and which is known variously as ‘I’, consciousness, awareness or God’s infinite being – is that aspect of mind that cannot be removed from it and is common to all beings. Indeed, it is common to all existence.
It is equally available to all people, at all times and under all circumstances, and it is the foundation of peace within individuals, families, communities and nations. As such, it must be the foundation of civilisation. To found a civilisation upon any other knowledge is to build a house on the shifting sands of local, temporal belief, and this can never be the basis for true community, tolerance and harmony.
All that is required is for the mind to notice that its own essential existence is shared with the existence of all beings and things, and to live the implications of that recognition in all realms of life.