Tracing Back to Your True Nature

If lost in experience, ask: ‘What is aware of my experience?’ Whatever knows your thoughts isn’t itself a thought. Don’t seek this with your mind – anything found would be an object. Your mind can only go towards objects, not towards your essence; it can only relax back into awareness. Like actor John Smith playing King Lear, we derive selfhood from awareness but personhood from experience. King Lear traces back to his true nature: ‘I’m not my thoughts; I’m what’s aware of them’. Some teachings use intermediary steps – focusing on breath or mantra – recognising the mind’s habit of attending to experience is strong. This steadies the mind before stepping back to awareness. In this approach, we go directly back: ‘What am I in the absence of thinking?’ Each return erodes old habits until you make your home in being, no longer visiting briefly but living there, where causeless peace rises from within.

If lost in experience, ask: ‘What is aware of my experience?’ Whatever knows your thoughts isn’t itself a thought. Don’t seek this with your mind – anything found would be an object. Your mind can only go towards objects, not towards your essence; it can only relax back into awareness. Like actor John Smith playing King Lear, we derive selfhood from awareness but personhood from experience. King Lear traces back to his true nature: ‘I’m not my thoughts; I’m what’s aware of them’. Some teachings use intermediary steps – focusing on breath or mantra – recognising the mind’s habit of attending to experience is strong. This steadies the mind before stepping back to awareness. In this approach, we go directly back: ‘What am I in the absence of thinking?’ Each return erodes old habits until you make your home in being, no longer visiting briefly but living there, where causeless peace rises from within.