Self-Luminous Being

Your most fundamental experience is the experience of being. Before you know any thought, feeling, sensation, or perception, you know that you are. Most believe their primary experience is being a body – it is not. A newborn infant knows that it is, but has no idea it is a body. All experience takes place in subject-object relationship, except the awareness of being – here, subject and object are the same. Your being is self-luminous; it knows itself just by being itself. You cannot direct attention towards yourself because you are already there, too close to know yourself as an object – yet this is the most familiar experience there is. You cannot cease knowing yourself, just as the sun cannot cease illuminating itself. Meditation is the relaxing of attention, sinking into being like descending into the still depths of the ocean. Make your being your home. There is no distance from yourself to yourself, no path.