The grace of awareness.
Only awareness knows awareness; nobody can give or pass it along to an imagined ‘you’. Awareness is intrinsic, innate, ineffable – not knowable by any conceptual, apparently knowledgeable, ‘you’. To know formless awareness is to be it. To simply, actually, see one is aware, now.* There’s no thought, no technique, just enough quiet space in one’s head, and an open window. Awareness IS. It lies in the direct seeing of the obvious, only now, only here. The denial is easy – one has ‘become comfortably numb’ when one apparently lives in Nameland, near Meville, NV; in yesterday’s memories, today’s pains, and tomorrow’s plans.
That’s not alive living, that’s recycling, pretending, functioning abstractly, theoretically, headfully. Occasionally pleasantly, often painfully. There’s only endless comparison, confusion, contradiction, and conflict there, yes? Those attempted conclusions keep one distracted and restless: “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.” (Thoreau) But, suffering and denial aside, nothing real is lost; all that struggle is not what we are: love, beauty, peace, and joy.
*The act of seeing implies humility. Not the humility the church preaches, or the induced humility of a monk, or the vain man trying to be humble – we are talking about a humility which is not at all induced, which is not an act of self-abnegation but a natural thing that comes inevitably and easily through the intensity of seeing.
~ J Krishnamurti
