‘In my meetings in Europe and America I have asked thousands of people if they were ever asked by their parents, teachers or professors who or what it is that knows or is aware of their experience, and not a single person has yet answered in the affirmative.’                                                                                                    ~ Rupert Spira

Who or what is it that knows or is aware of our experience? We say ‘our’, because whatever it is, whether we know it or not, it is shared by all beings and things.

Most of our problems are the result of acting out of ignorance. That is, we act while ignoring our true nature. To overlook the fact that awareness, our core essence, is personified by the dissolution of separateness between self and others, and whose qualities are peace, love, and happiness, is to miss being human.

We talk about reform, revolution, ending racism and bigotry, closing the economic divide between the rich and the poor, as we have done for thousands of years without any lasting results. All attempts for positive change falling on increasingly deaf ears. Ignoring ears.

A dear old friend has proposed that the only way to revitalize, reenergize, reinvent, our visibly crumbling society is through revamping our educational system.  

We are to blame for the current condition of the planet. Or, more specifically, our ignorance is to blame. Ignorance drives our downfall. Out of ignorance we choose leaders with no leadership qualities, who only serve their own separate self-interests, representing our collective self-serving egoic needs. Out of ignorance we defend, often to our deaths, our beliefs and opinions against those with opposing beliefs and opinions.

To act with compassion and clarity gives us the greatest chance of balancing inequities and wrongdoings created by ignorance. And the only way to do this is to discover our true nature – that within us that is ever-present and aware; that which knows all experience but itself is not an experience. All experiences come and go, but aware presence doesn’t come and go with them.

Education is the key to positive and lasting change. It is the responsibility of parents and educators to ask themselves who or what it is that knows their experience, and, in the process, discover that their true nature is infinite and eternal consciousness. Then to ask their children, their students, the same question. With a mutual discovery of our real identity, ‘our’ being central to this understanding, the idea of separateness and living a life of division will dissolve. In its place will be revealed the timeless and limitless qualities of absolute awareness.  We will then effortlessly act with compassion and clarity rather than out of ignorance, fear, and greed. There will be no self, no other, only love.