Awareness, the seeing and knowing capacity of your manifested form in body and mind in this or that location in time and space, is your essential nature. That is who and what you are. But this awareness that you are is not an object. It can’t be pointed to and said “there, that’s it!” This awareness or beingness is synonymous with nonduality, Brahman, nirvana, and arguably the god beyond form of the worlds major religions. Awareness is the same awareness in all apparently separate individuals.
It could be said that every person is a mirror in which awareness can behold itself. Awareness is the eternal subject that knows all experiences but is not bound by any of them. You are this same awareness. Although this awareness, which is the same in all, is not the thought I am that you tack onto it. The instant you are beholding the wonders of creation, say for instance a beautiful sunset, and the thought arises “I love this that I see” you’ve identified the awareness of the experience with a concept I which is doing the seeing. In reality there is only the arising of a sunset upon awareness or consciousness.
This crafty “I” or self-assertion masks the indivisible experience of reality as One so that it can not be beheld untarnished in its magnificent splendor and glory. There is only This, awareness. Awareness consists of formlessness or emptiness, it is not an object. This awareness that you are is formless and empty, beyond and prior to all manifestation and quietly persists through all appearances experienced as the manifest reality.
Form, the incarnation of the unmanifest arises from awareness, has its life in It, and returns to It at its death. Advaita Vedanta teaches that the manifest world is a superimposition upon Brahman or awareness. In other words the apparent world we experience is form overlain on the formless One. What is form is none other than the formless, potentiality incarnated. It is the error of the apparent self to assert that it is other than this formless reality which manifests for the sole purpose of reflecting and enjoying itself. In Christian terms this is sin, that which Adam and Eve committed in the garden of Eden.
Awareness, experience, and the knowing capacity are one. There is no distinction between the seeing of any experience and the concurrent understanding or knowing of its nature. It is only the thinking mind that divides reality into that which is aware, the thinker who claims to be this awareness – the identity, I am – and the experience as something outside itself. The self-assertion is the minds power of delusion which tirelessly works to separate reality into a subject among multiple appearances, occurrences, happenings, and doings. The mind is an outstanding tool for navigating the world so long as it is used within its realm of application. It commits the unforgivable sin when it takes its provisional role as navigator of the relative world to be an ultimate truth. The self-assertive I am is an aggressive desire to co-opt reality for itself.
Your essential nature is what gives life to your sense of “I am-ness”. If you were not aware of who you are there would be no “you”. From the open space of unbridled awareness you see the world go by. You watch “you” do its thing. It acts, but you are only the observer. From the place of awareness there is no doer to be doing anything. All manifestation is simply happening. Objects arise, continue for a time, and pass away. Yet, as you already know, you as the observer is and has always been the same. You are just that awareness, that consciousness, that seeing, that knowing.
