“Either the truth can stand on its own or it’s not the truth.”                                                                                                                   ~ Francis Lucille

Can you truly claim consciousness or awareness as your own? Is consciousness, that which is reading these words, a self-contained, personal attribute of your body-mind? And, if so, can we conclude that an individual consciousness resides in each of the seven billion different body-minds on the planet? This is the common belief, but if we look at the nature of this so-called individual consciousness it doesn’t seem to be our actual experience.

Does consciousness share the limits of a body-mind? Does it have a beginning or end? No. There is never a time when you can say consciousness is not present. It does not come and go like the birth and death of a body-mind – it is beyond time. Does it have an edge or a boundary? No. You cannot find a place where consciousness ends and something else begins – it is beyond space.

Something that is beyond time we call eternal. Something that is beyond space we call infinite. If something is eternal and infinite, where is there room for two?

Consciousness stands alone at the heart of our experience. You can take nothing from it and add nothing to it. It is complete in its emptiness, which makes it absolutely full. It is everywhere in its nowhere-ness.

We don’t need some special knowledge or mystical transmission to know this. A simple, earnest, honest investigation is all it takes to see that within the realm of concepts all there is is consciousness or awareness.

And there cannot be two. No separation between anything, any thing. All made of the same stuff. No self, no other. Just this. And you, I, we, are this – seven billion unique expressions of one consciousness whose essence is love.

And then we smile as even this idea dissolves in the spaceless space of absolute freedom.