Being Needs No Enlightenment or Awakening

Enlightenment, awakening, self-realisation, liberation, and so on, simply mean being naked being before it is qualified by experience. Our being does not need to be enlightened, awakened, realised or liberated. It is already shining behind and pervades all experience; always, already awake and pervading waking, dreaming, and sleeping; already the sole reality from which everything derives ‘independent existence’; already intimate with but independent of experience content. The progressive and Direct paths address the self we seem to be, but they ultimately shift to the Pathless Path in which there is no practice, no method, no effort – we start and end with simply being. This is also the pinnacle of devotion or surrender. We devote or surrender ourselves to God’s infinite being, where there is no room for two – let alone, eight billion – beings. Actually, the finite self does not surrender, it is surrendered. We remain as being amidst experience. This is praying without ceasing.

Enlightenment, awakening, self-realisation, liberation, and so on, simply mean being naked being before it is qualified by experience. Our being does not need to be enlightened, awakened, realised or liberated. It is already shining behind and pervades all experience; always, already awake and pervading waking, dreaming, and sleeping; already the sole reality from which everything derives ‘independent existence’; already intimate with but independent of experience content. The progressive and Direct paths address the self we seem to be, but they ultimately shift to the Pathless Path in which there is no practice, no method, no effort – we start and end with simply being. This is also the pinnacle of devotion or surrender. We devote or surrender ourselves to God’s infinite being, where there is no room for two – let alone, eight billion – beings. Actually, the finite self does not surrender, it is surrendered. We remain as being amidst experience. This is praying without ceasing.