If you’re entirely absorbed in the drama of experience, you suffer or enjoy accordingly. But if you remain in touch with being throughout experience, you are always at peace.

Being shines in the midst of all experience. In fact, you could say that all experience is a colouring of being, just as the movie is a colouring of the screen. Countless colours, yet always the same colourless screen; countless experiences, yet always the same transparent, silent, peaceful being.

The one caught up in the movie suffers or enjoys depending on how the story unfolds. The one who sees the screen is at peace, whatever the story contains.

There is nothing extraordinary or spiritual about the experience of being. Being is the most obvious, intimate and familiar experience there is – so obvious, so intimate, so familiar that we almost always overlook it.

Being is like that but even more intimate, more familiar, more ordinary, more transparent. It lies, so to speak, behind even your breathing. And like your breathing, being is so quiet, so subtle, that it is almost always eclipsed by the brighter, more attention-grabbing content of experience.

The quiet knowledge ‘I am’ shines steadily, whatever the circumstances. When stripped of the qualities it temporarily seems to acquire from thoughts, feelings and sensations, being reveals itself as open, undivided, ever-present and deeply peaceful. It is not something you possess; it is what you are.

In everyday life, your attention is caught by a stream of thoughts, passing moods, physical sensations, and the sights and sounds around you. As a result, your being fades into the background and is overlooked.

The experience of simply being is what you refer to when you say ‘I am’. And everybody can say from experience, ‘I am’. The reason everyone can say ‘I am’ is because everyone has the experience of being.

When you say, ‘I am lonely’ or ‘I am anxious’, the ‘I am’ is present. When you say, ‘I am depressed’ or ‘I am upset’, the ‘I am’ is present. When you say, ‘I am married’ or ‘I am single’, ‘I am’ is still there. When you say, ‘I am healthy’ or ‘I am sick’, the same ‘I am’ remains.