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The now is inseparable from who you are at the deepest level.

***

Many things in your life matter but only one thing matters absolutely.

It matters whether you succeed or fail in the eyes of the world. It matters whether you are healthy or not healthy, whether you are educated or not educated. It matters whether you are rich or poor. It certainly makes a difference in your life.

Yes, all these things matter, relatively speaking. But they don't matter absolutely. There is something that matters more than any of those things and that is finding the essence of who your are beyond that short-lived entity, that short-lived personalized sense of self.

You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life but by realizing who you are at the deepest level.

***

Reincarnation doesn't help you if in your next incarnation you still don't know who you are.

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All the misery on the planet arises due to a personalized sense of me or us. That covers up the essence of who you are. When you are unaware of that inner essence, in the end, you always create misery. It's as simple as that. When you don't know who you are, you create a mind-made self as a substitute for your beautiful, divine being and cling to that fearful and needy self.

Protecting and enhancing that false sense of self then becomes your primary motivating force.

***

Many expressions that are in common usage and sometimes the structure of language itself, reveal the fact that people don't know who they are. You say, “He lost his life.” Or, “my life” as if life were something that you can possess or lose.

The truth is you don't have a life, you are life, the one life, the one conscious that pervades the entire universe and takes temporary form to experience itself as a stone or a blade of grass, as an animal, a person, a star or a galaxy.

Can you sense deep within that you already know that. Can you sense that you already are that?

***

For most things in life, you need time: to learn a new skill, build a house, become an expert, make a cup of tea.

Time is useless, however, for the most essential thing in life, the one thing that really matters, self-realization-which means knowing who you are beyond the surface self, beyond your name, your physical form, your history, your story.

You cannot find yourself in the past or future. The only place where you can find yourself in the Now.

Spiritual seekers look for self realization or enlightenment in the future. To be a seeker implies that you need the future. If this is what you believe, it becomes true for you. You will need time until you realize that you don't need time to be who you are.

***

When you look at a tree, you are aware of the tree. When you have a thought or feeling, you are aware of that thought or feeling. When you have a pleasurable or painful experience, you are aware of that experience.

These seem to be true and obvious statements. Yet if you look at them very closely, you will find that in a subtle way their very structure contains a fundamental illusion, an illusion which is unavoidable when you use language. Thought and language create an apparent duality and a separate person where there is none.

The truth is you are not somebody who is aware of the tree, the thought, feeling or experience. You are the awareness or consciousness in and by which those things appear.

As you go about your life, can you be aware of yourself as the awareness in which the entire content of your life unfolds?

***

You say, “I want to know myself.” You are the I. You are the knowing. You are the consciousness through which everything is known and that cannot know itself. It is itself.

There is nothing to know beyond that. And yet all knowing arises out of it. The “I” cannot make itself into an object of knowledge, of consciousness.

So you cannot become an object to yourself. That is the very reason the illusion of egoic identity arose because mentally you made yourself into an object. “That's me,” you say, and then you begin to have a relationship with yourself and tell others and yourself your story.

***

By knowing yourself as the awareness in which phenomenal existence happens, you become free of dependency on phenomena and free of self seeking in situations, places, and conditions. In other words, what happens or doesn't happen is not that important anymore. Things lose their heaviness, their seriousness. A playfulness comes into your life. You recognize this world as a cosmic dance, the dance of form. No more and no less.

***

When you know who you truly are, there is an abiding alive sense of peace. You could call it joy because that's what joy is, vibrantly alive peace. It is the joy of knowing yourself as the very life essence before life takes on form. That is the joy of being, of being who you truly are.

Just as water can be solid, liquid, or gaseous, consciousness can be seen to be frozen as physical matter, liquid as mind and thought, or formless as pure consciousness.

Pure consciousness is life before it comes into manifestation and that life looks at the world of form through your eyes because consciousness is who you are.

When you know yourself as that, then you recognize yourself in everything. It is a state of complete clarity of perception. You are no longer an entity with a heavy past that becomes a screen of concepts through which every experience is interpreted. When you perceive without interpretation, you can then sense what it is that is perceiving. The most we can say in language is that there is a field of alert stillness in which the perception happens.

Through you, formless consciousness has become aware of itself.

***

Most people's lives are run by desire and fear.

Desire is the need to add something to yourself in order to be yourself more fully. All fear is the fear of losing something, and thereby become diminished and be less.

These two movements obscure the fact that being cannot be given or taken away. Being in its fullness is already within you, now.

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