Awareness of Being Is the Essence of Meditation

We can distil the essence of the non-dual understanding into one sentence: peace and happiness are the nature of our being, and our being is shared with everyone and everything. To understand this is to understand the essence of all great religious and spiritual traditions. No further practice is required to live from this understanding. There is the inner experience of thoughts and feelings and the outer experience of the world. In this contemplation, we have no preconceived ideas about meditation. If the question arises, ‘What should I be doing?’, the answer is ‘Nothing’. Simply let the activity of your mind unfold. What is it that knows this activity? ‘I’ am aware of thoughts, feelings and sensations. This ‘I’, this light of knowing, of awareness, renders experience knowable. We, awareness, are the constant light that shines on the ever-changing content of experience. Awareness of being is the essence of meditation; the highest form of prayer.

We can distil the essence of the non-dual understanding into one sentence: peace and happiness are the nature of our being, and our being is shared with everyone and everything. To understand this is to understand the essence of all great religious and spiritual traditions. No further practice is required to live from this understanding. There is the inner experience of thoughts and feelings and the outer experience of the world. In this contemplation, we have no preconceived ideas about meditation. If the question arises, ‘What should I be doing?’, the answer is ‘Nothing’. Simply let the activity of your mind unfold. What is it that knows this activity? ‘I’ am aware of thoughts, feelings and sensations. This ‘I’, this light of knowing, of awareness, renders experience knowable. We, awareness, are the constant light that shines on the ever-changing content of experience. Awareness of being is the essence of meditation; the highest form of prayer.