Let’s go directly to the source of our being. Just for a moment set aside your story – all your ideas, sensations, and perceptions of a personal self, of who you think you are. This includes your gender, age, body type, relationships, career, likes and dislikes, successes and failures, hopes, dreams, fears, and memories. Set aside all concepts, beliefs, opinions, positions, and theories of what you think and feel to be right or wrong, good or bad. Gently set all of these to one side and then notice what’s left . . .

Space?

Emptiness?

Nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

Yet if you were to ask yourself the question, do I exist? you would immediately answer yes. You wouldn’t have to refer to anything to arrive at this answer. You just know this as an irrefutable fact. You know intuitively that even without all of your stuff that you are present and aware – that your essential being is an aware presence. If there’s any doubt, you can check this out any time in your own experience. You will always come up with the same answer: If I set aside all that I think that I am, I am left with nothing, an emptiness, yet I know that I exist, that I am present and aware.

Stay with this sense of being. Don’t add anything extra. And as we abide as this aware presence, let’s examine its qualities.

Can you find a beginning to this aware presence? A place where something else stops and awareness begins? Can you find an end to it? A specific place where awareness stops and something else begins? The answer to both questions is obviously no.

There is no indication whatsoever, no experiential evidence, that awareness has a beginning or an end, a birth or a death. In other words, it’s timeless, or beyond time. One word for that is eternal.

Can you find a boundary to this aware presence? Expanding in all directions, can you find an edge, a border – a place where awareness stops and something else begins? It appears as though awareness goes on forever, is limitless, or in other words, infinite.

Don’t believe a word of this. Look for yourself. Experience for yourself whether or not there are any limits to your essential being as this so-called aware presence.

If, in fact, you do experience the limitless, timeless qualities of this aware presence that appears to be who and what you are at the core of your being, ask yourself the question: If my awareness, or consciousness, has no beginning and no end, no edge or boundary, is outside of time and goes on forever, in other words, is eternal and infinite, where is there room for two of them?

If something fills up all space and time, better yet, goes beyond all space and time, it has to be everywhere. No room for two.

There’s just one thing going on, and you, I, we, all things, are IT.

Just for a moment, before you begin to live again as the story you set aside a moment ago, bask in the pure light of this effortless understanding.