"Don't pretend to be what you are not,
don't refuse to be what you are."
- Nisargadatta Maharaj

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"The eye through which I see God
is the same eye through which God sees me:
my eye and God's eye are one eye,
one seeing, one knowing, one love."
- Meister Eckhart

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BECAUSE I WAS NOT A ‘SEEKER,’ did not have preconceptions about what to look for or what might ‘happen,’ what did happen was almost as spontaneous, as innocent, as waking up from sleep and getting up and going about your day. Everything was completely different, but it had always been. Everything had shifted, but it just was. Some time passed and some learning before intellectual understanding caught up with, filled in the implications of, the shift in perception that had occurred.

Along with Sat, Chit, Ananda, (Alive, Intelligence, Outpouring: Being, Consciousness, Bliss) there was a fourth thing that I knew about Presence, about the Brilliance. I felt it, knew it at the time on a level beyond the mind, but my thoughts and categories wouldn’t let me go there with conceptual understanding until somewhat later. In fact looking back on it, it’s rather odd that, having realized that there is no ‘david,’ that there is nobody home, that the obvious implication of this was not understood conceptually until some time later. But then, there wasn’t exactly a lot of conceptual basis or preparation going into this. Presence was persistent: it was not an experience that came and went. Once ‘here,’ ‘It’ never left; ‘I’ never left.

Days later I left the jungle, but Presence continued and I very soon came upon people and words and concepts that let me understand what my heart knew but my mind hadn’t immediately had words for: that it is Presence Itself looking out through david’s eyes, through all eyes. It always has been. There is nothing else. Presence is the ‘I’ that knows ‘I Am.’ Presence is not other, outside. Presence, Sat Chit Ananda, is my own heart, filling the galaxy; my own Self. This has always been here, and It Is What I Am. While what I thought I was, my own self, is not.

This ‘I’, this Self, is All That Is. It is the only Is-ness that Is. It is all that exists; the individual who thinks he is experiencing it, understanding it, does not. You can be told this forever and think, yeah, okay, I get that. But you don’t. When this finally sinks in, hits home, explodes, nothing can any longer be the same. Nothing ever was.

And yet in another sense there was no ‘awakening.’ Because there is no one to awaken. ‘david’ has never existed, is a dream character, part of the cosmic joke. And Who I really Am is All That Is, which has never been asleep, has no need to awaken from or to anything.

‘I Am That’ is the other half, the completion, of the seeing ‘there is no one home.’

“Love says, ‘I am everything.’
Wisdom says, ‘I am nothing.’
Between these two my life flows.”
(Nisargadatta Maharaj)

The Understanding here will be forever colored by the fact that the awareness that ‘I am not’ came first, and as such is the basis, the essential pivotal breakthrough insight into awareness of What Is. Thus the Understanding that universal infinite Presence Awareness Brilliance is what ‘I’ is, is always in the context of that complete emptiness, the knowing that the separate self simply is not. Who is infinite Presence? Not ‘me!’ No ‘who’ at all. Only the ‘I’ which is All That Is.

There are cases where the realization ‘I Am,’ or perhaps a glimpse of it, comes first, without the surrender and the profound seeing that as any kind of an individual to be anything, ‘I am not.’ The result then may be something quite different.

So then, various sporadic practices - praying, shamanic journeying, some meditation - they were part of the conditioned routine of this dream character, and for a time they continue to be done but I see they are part of the dream. Pray to whom? Journey to where? There is no other, no two. These become gateways to where I already am: Sat, Chit, Ananda, I Am That. There is no place to go, nothing to do: all is Awareness, around and through and as ‘us.’ This life is lived, in and around and through this mind/body thing, but not by a ‘me.’

Spiritual practices and efforts, once motivated by a sense of separation or a need to connect, a need for meaning or purpose, fall away and cease naturally, with no intent or effort to stop them or continue them: they simply do not arise. What happens, happens spontaneously. Sometimes, quite often, there is sitting quietly, in stillness, in the Brilliance, in profound peace. But this can hardly be called praying or meditating. It is no thing, it is emptiness. It is Being. It is Consciousness. It is Bliss.

Life is, quite suddenly, marvelously, utterly, simple.

Ego, the sense of an individual self and all its misperceptions, is seen as itself a mistaken perception, as having never existed. The dream character goes on being the dream character: brushes its teeth, trims its beard, still likes the same foods, still has poor social skills and finds many things that are said and done confusing or disorienting. As it always did. But the character has been gutted, hollowed. It used to take itself seriously, think it was someone. Now when it looks within it knows there is nobody home. The character is a sham. Only the deep sense ‘I Am’ remains and this is known not to belong to the character, but to Presence, which is always everywhere perfect Brilliance.

Like the electric fan which keeps spinning after the plug is pulled, like the bicycle that rolls on for awhile after the rider has jumped off, forty six years of conditioning had worn a path that this mind/body thing, creature of habit, could follow in its sleep. Which of course is exactly what it had been doing, following the script of the dream. Now it winds down. Took a lifetime of dreaming to write its story, to accumulate, accrete, build up these thoughts and feelings and memories and experiences into this personality. Now, with no intent or effort to either stop or continue, it may take a lifetime to fall away. Or a moment. Or not. While there is watching, witnessing. It doesn’t matter. It just does not make the slightest difference.