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Most of us are searching. We feel like something is not quite right in our lives, and we search blogs, books, religions, and philosophies in an attempt to find It. This It is the ultimate answer – the thing that will cut through all the pain, suffering, and frustration of life. This It will make us truly happy.

But as we pursue It, we discover that every route we follow still carries us on a roller-coaster that has sometimes been called the ‘Wheel of Samsara’. We travel up and down on this wheel, sometimes feeling blissful and joyous, sometimes careening into misery and confusion.

No matter where we look, we can’t seem to find clarity.

Awakening

And then some teacher flashes the temptation of Awakening into our world. That’s It! I can become enlightened, and all the world’s problems will tumble off of me like the proverbial water off a duck’s back.

We sense that this is truly the key to a wonderful life. This somehow seems different than all those other paths. But when we start to explore it, we again find ourselves frustrated. Whether the teacher is modern or ancient, they tend to speak in senseless riddles. They claim that they can’t tell us what the secret is. They claim that you won’t find It if you are searching for it. Some even claim that no one can achieve It!

Why can’t they speak plainly and stop playing games?

Perspectives

The reason that these teachers sound so illogical to us is that they are trying to help us engage in a total and complete revolution in our thinking. This revolution is so utterly complete that it can’t be adequately described using the language of our current world-view.

You see, usually when we want to make a change in our lives, we engage in a shift of perspective. If we learn something new, or we read a book, or we try to think about things in a new way, we’re attempting to shift our perspective.

This works remarkably well. By shifting your perspective, you can come to have more engaging relationships, you can learn to communicate more effectively, you can meet and conquer challenges, and you can constantly evolve emotionally, physically, and mentally.

What we’re missing, however, is the fact that every perspective has a ‘someone’ who is perceiving. No matter how you view life, you’re always viewing it from a ‘point of view’. And someone has to be doing the viewing!

This seems obvious to us, but then those confusing teachers come along and tell us that the problem has nothing at all to do with perspectives. Changing our perspectives, they tell us, delivers only a temporary fix to the problem. The real problem is this idea or sensation that ‘someone’ is there to take different perspectives in the first place.

Someone’s Not Home

What’s so wrong with having a ‘someone’ there to do the perceiving? It becomes rather pointless to try to examine this question, simply because we are so totally convinced that a ‘someone’ is there. It’s ridiculous to think otherwise. And yet, we’re told that if we do enough inner exploration, we’ll discover that this ‘someone’ is nowhere to be found. Indeed, we’re told we’ll discover that it’s a fabrication – the same genre of fabrication as money. Money, of course, is ‘real’ because we all agree upon it. But it exists only by human consensus. We could argue that money does lots of wonderful things for us. But money also causes us a lot of problems. The ‘someone’ is just like this.

It does no good to try to convince yourself that there is no ‘someone’. But if you devote yourself to becoming aware of your mind’s activity, you’ll discover this strange fact for yourself.

Perspectives

Some Buddhist schools of thought take a very negative approach to helping us realize that there is no ‘someone’. Negative in the sense of assuring us that reality itself is a sort of ‘emptiness’. This is not because reality itself can accurately be described as ‘emptiness’. It is because if It is described positively, we’re more apt to create mental images of It and then chase our mental images instead of It itself.

What if we describe It as Joyous Bliss? Or as Universal Oneness? Immediately, we create an idea of what these things look like, and attempt to change our perspective so that we can capture the idea.

If we feel that enlightenment is Joyous Bliss, we try to be happy all the time, and end up attempting to force ourselves into different emotional patterns (which is really what we were previously doing when we were reading self-help books). If we feel that enlightenment is Universal Oneness, we attempt to feel our connection with all things, and do meditations in which we ‘put ourselves in the shoes’ of all the things in the universe, from the tiniest atom to the swirling galaxies.

But of course, all we’re doing is making ideas in our heads.

The negative approach hopes to give us nothing to grasp on to. If we are clinging to a feeling of Unity, the negative approach tells us that there is nothing there that can be unified. If we are clinging to Bliss, we are told that bliss is just more suffering, and that only an empty mind is Awake.

Even here, however, we can lay traps for ourselves. Emptiness and nothing can become a very subtle new brand of ‘something’ in our lives, and soon we are insisting that there is no ‘me’ here at all, no ‘world’ around the ‘no-me’, and nothing that can be making all these funny assertions about emptiness and non-existence.

No Perspectives

Awareness is all we need. With simple awareness, we can watch ourselves making new perspectives. Look! I’m making an idea. It’s called ‘one with the universe’, and here’s what it looks like. Or It’s called ‘nothing’, and here’s what I think it is.

Meditation is a useful tool for seeing this. At its purest, we simply watch our minds, and what we discover will lead us to our own realizations. The tricky thing about meditation is that it’s easy to become hooked. Each time we meditate, we bring along the ‘observer’ who is present in our everyday life. You can imagine that the observer is a little picture we draw (and must continually re-draw because otherwise the ink would fade). Our observer is a picture of a stick figure sitting on a chair, and it’s looking across the room at a big-screen TV. That TV is our mind’s activity – the perceptual window through which we look out at the world around us. And the stick-figure is ‘me’, doing the watching.

When we bring this little picture into our meditation, we can become stuck in the rather addicting sensations meditation gives us. Some of us might encounter dramatic insight, adding excitement to our lives. Others of us will experience a heightened sense of peace, giving us respite from lives that often seem too hectic. Still others of us become fascinated by the ever-shifting images and thoughts that flicker through our heads.

It doesn’t really matter what our fascination is. The important thing is to recognize that through all of this, we are always creating and reinforcing the picture of our ‘watcher’.

At some point in our meditation, things might shift. Perhaps we start wondering who it is that is sitting on the chair watching the TV screen, and begin trying to watch that person (and then to watch the person who is watching that person, and onward to infinity). Or perhaps things suddenly snap, and we realize that awareness is just fine on its own. We see that our little picture is not necessary, it doesn’t make sense, it gives us no benefits, and there is no evidence whatsoever for its existence.

Awareness

This final discovery is the discovery that our awareness doesn’t need a ‘doer’ in order to function. Our awareness does just fine on its own. It is like our beating heart, which does not need our conscious help in order to beat. This awareness is available to all of us, right now, and you don’t need special techniques in order to discover it. True, a given technique might work spectacularly for you, but you may have to do a lot of searching to find a technique that fits.

Your awareness holds all the answers. Your awareness is more wise than any guru. No religion or blogger or secret mantra holds more power than your simple awareness. The words I write here are hopelessly inept, just as apt to create new pictures as they are to take the picture away.

Awareness is the key. In our busy lives, we’ll need to sit down a little and pay attention if we want to let our awareness peek through. But to really let it out, we can’t force it. You, as an individual, have no idea how awareness functions. You can’t improve on it, you can’t invoke it, and you can’t free it. It doesn’t need your help.

This doesn’t mean that we should just sit around and wait for awareness to emerge. Though we can’t make awareness happen, we can hinder our awareness. We hinder it simply by doing our best to ignore it.

Our awareness is already present in our lives. But when we learn to ignore it, our mind confronts an immense, confusing world. The only way we can make this world bearable is to fill it with as many ‘things’ as we can. So we invent all the separations, all the theories and ideas and philosphies, so that the world will seem to make at least a little sense. In effect, when we ignore awareness, we feel compelled to create our drawing of the stick figure and the TV.

Our call is to stop trying to cultivate awareness. Instead, notice your efforts at ignoring awareness. Notice your efforts to continually draw that picture of you and the TV. Notice what your mind is constantly applying itself to and how that creates a world of separation.

Simply notice. Your awareness will do the rest.