Meditation Is Self-Remembrance

Notice that all your experience is illuminated by the light of awareness – your thoughts, bodily sensations, sounds. Experience consists of content plus the awareness that knows it. What is awareness’s nature? It is ever-present, the constant factor in all changing experience, illuminating everything from last night’s dreams to this moment’s perceptions. Awareness is not itself an experience but makes all experience possible. It is self-knowing, self-illuminating, like the sun. Most people are so absorbed in experience’s content that they overlook awareness itself. Meditation is simply self-remembrance – not of something once known, but of what we eternally are underneath experience’s drama. You cannot find awareness; you can only be awareness knowingly. Just as a character in a film searching for the screen cannot find it anywhere in the movie’s time and space, yet it is all there is to the movie, awareness cannot be found anywhere in experience yet is all there is to experience.

Notice that all your experience is illuminated by the light of awareness – your thoughts, bodily sensations, sounds. Experience consists of content plus the awareness that knows it. What is awareness’s nature? It is ever-present, the constant factor in all changing experience, illuminating everything from last night’s dreams to this moment’s perceptions. Awareness is not itself an experience but makes all experience possible. It is self-knowing, self-illuminating, like the sun. Most people are so absorbed in experience’s content that they overlook awareness itself. Meditation is simply self-remembrance – not of something once known, but of what we eternally are underneath experience’s drama. You cannot find awareness; you can only be awareness knowingly. Just as a character in a film searching for the screen cannot find it anywhere in the movie’s time and space, yet it is all there is to the movie, awareness cannot be found anywhere in experience yet is all there is to experience.