For now, I simply invite you to notice: you are aware. However ordinary this may seem, it is the most extraordinary fact in the universe. It is the light by which everything else is known, and yet it never appears as an object in that light. It is closer to you than your own breath, and yet it is the vastness in which all experience appears.

This recognition doesn’t solve the practical challenges of life, but it provides an unshakeable foundation of peace and understanding from which all of life’s activities can be approached with clarity and love.

Over the weeks ahead, we’ll discover together that this simple recognition of being aware has the power to transform our understanding of everything. We’ll explore how the knowing awareness in which all experience appears is not limited by or contained within the experiences it knows. We’ll see how this awareness is not born when the body is born,... See more

It is my experience that the implications of the ‘consciousness-only’ model that is suggested in this book continue to reveal themselves long after the initial insight or recognition itself, gradually colonising and reconditioning the way we think and feel, and subsequently informing and transforming our activities and relationships. It is for each... See more

This investigation doesn’t require you to change anything about your life or adopt any particular beliefs. It simply asks you to pay attention to what is already most obvious and intimate about your experience: the fact that experience is known, and that there is something that knows it.

Take a moment now to notice that you are aware of these words. Then notice that you are aware of being aware. This simple recognition – I am aware that I am aware – is the beginning of the most profound investigation possible. It’s the mind’s recognition of its own essential nature.

The question that will guide our entire journey is deceptively simple: What is the nature of the knowing with which all experience is known?

Right now, as you read these words, notice that there is experience happening. Notice that this experience is known. Whatever is knowing this experience – call it awareness, consciousness, or simply the sense of being aware – this is what we’ll be exploring together.

Think of it this way: in a dream, the dreamed world seems entirely real and external to the dreamed character. The dream mountains appear to be made of solid rock, the dream water feels wet, the dream fire burns. Yet we know that the entire dream world, including the dreamed character who experiences it, is made of nothing but the one mind of the... See more