Enlightenment
The Boundless Full Consciousness of NOW is already open and present in this moment. It is the present existence itself, yet it is overlooked because of attention and focus being placed on external or internal objects, and it is being veiled by past conditioning. When you start to relax into what is already here right now, fully and totally, you become more familiar with your inherent Boundlessness, which is Freedom, Happiness, and Bliss.
What is Boundless Self?
Everyone is aware that something is happening; everybody has a certain point of view or a certain perception—or perhaps, on a lower level, a certain idea or a certain understanding.
Let’s imagine that there are ten people in the room, or a hundred people, and they’re all sitting in the same room, but everyone has a different perception, a different point of view, and a different experience.
So, what is the Now?
These varying perceptions arise because each mind filters the same reality through its own modifications—thoughts, memories, desires, and conditioning. Yet, beneath these subjective viewpoints lies a single, unchanging awareness that illuminates all experiences equally.
"The person is seen by himself as the "other". Who is this "seer" who sees himself as someone apart? Who or what is this self-luminous "consciousness" that is aware of the "other"? Whence has it come into existence? The opening verse leads us gradually to the Seer within, who cannot be seen:
The form is perceived, and the eye is its perceiver. The eye is perceived and the mind is its perceiver. The mind with its modifications is perceived and the Witness (the Self) is verily the perceiver. But the Witness is not perceived by any other."
This verse, from the classic text Drg-Drsya Viveka, attributed to Adi Shankara, who established Advaita Vedanta, points directly to the heart of the inquiry. No matter how many people sit in the room, experiencing the "Now" differently, the true Now—the pure presence of awareness—is the unchanging Witness itself. It is not one perception among many; it is that which knows all perceptions, untouched by their differences. In recognizing this Witness as your own Self, the apparent multiplicity dissolves into the one eternal Now.
Every single living being has a point of reference, an individual perception. There are billions of people on this earth, an uncountable number of animals, insects, birds, and mammals on this earth. Let’s imagine that the whole universe is like a big ball, and there is an uncountable number of souls in this big ball of the universe, having their own unique perception, their own unique view. Some of them are looking from this point, some of them are looking from that point, and millions and billions and trillions and quadrillions of souls are all having different points of view, within the same one universe, within the same one ball.
So, what is the Now? What is Consciousness, the Self, God? Is it individual? Apparently, no. Is it somebody up there looking down on everybody? No. Because that would be just another point of view looking down at everybody. You can look from beneath to everybody, you can look from above to everybody, and it’s still a point of view. Therefore, consciousness is permeating the whole universe and all individual points of view. Consciousness is looking through the whole universe, and through every single point of view, even from your cat’s eyes, even from the mosquito senses, even through the sun itself. From every point of view, Consciousness is aware. It’s looking. You can imagine how the cat sees the world, but you can’t really look through the cat’s experience if you are not the cat yourself.
Therefore, the only way back to Consciousness is to realize that everything that appears is within your awareness. All of this experience, no matter how many millions of kinds of possible variations of energetic experiences, all happen inside you. And who is this you? Of course, it’s not your two eyes. When you close your eyes, you’re still aware. So, this experience, no matter what form it takes, 3d, 4d, 5d, 12d, appears inside you. By saying inside you, we don’t mean inside your skin, or inside your head, or even inside your heart, because within the awareness of this experience, everything is included, even this furniture, computer, these walls, this building, it’s all included within your awareness. It’s not in your chakras, your head, or heart, or third eye, or anywhere else. It’s all in your awareness. All of it. Every single thing. Even all the things you don’t like, even all the fears and everything else, because these are experiences.
Good experiences appear in your awareness, and bad experiences appear in your awareness, too. Therefore, freedom does not come from changing bad experiences into good experiences. It does not come from trying to control and manipulate the environment, the outer environment, or the inner environment. Your inner environment is your thoughts, emotions, feelings, energies, sensations, perceptions, and senses. Freedom is realizing where everything is happening, which is in your awareness. There is this apparent journey back to awareness because your awareness is very quickly taken over by attention and the mind. One moment you’re aware, and the next moment, you’re following your thoughts, what pops into your head. One moment you’re in awareness, and the next moment you’re in an amazing feeling inside your heart, and you lose awareness itself. You just flow your attention into the heart, into this loving sense that is so beautiful that you just want to stay there. And you become energy or part of it.
So, there’s an apparent journey back to awareness. When awareness becomes non-dual and self-aware, that is Enlightenment. It equals the Self, or God, Shiva Consciousness, Brahman, or any other name that you want to give it. So, instead of naming things, we should realize that we are aware, that everyone is aware right now. The distraction of your awareness that grabs your focus and further entertains your mind are just distractions, entanglements, attachments, and desires. That is called bondage, entanglement, or conditioning. If your focus is entangled with objects, with spaces, with emotions, thoughts, or energies, it is a conditioned focus. It’s not free. It is subject to the conditions of these thoughts, emotions, energies, or spaces. Even beautiful emotions, like love, are conditioned unless this love is boundless beyond attention.
There is nothing wrong with your focus, as long as it’s not entangled with what is within your focus. Your focus and attention are not the problems; it’s the entanglement that is the problem. Entanglement means mixture. Attention mixed up with perception. When it’s mixed up with that which it perceives, it’s conditioned, narrower, limited, or even closed to a certain extent.
The real Now is everything, unentangled, unconditioned, boundless, open, aware. That is Enlightened Consciousness itself. It is, we may say, very bright, self-radiant, but not to be focused on, not to be entangled with, not to be limited by. Everything is inside you, and this “you” is awareness itself, which is aware of this experience - that is the 1st step of Enlightenment. You need to relax your focus; you need to relax entanglement with your experience. You can soften your attention. The first and most important step is to slow down because if you’re fast, it’s much more difficult to disentangle from experience.
So slow down your experience. Slow down your inner experience, thoughts, emotions, and energies. You can recognize there is a certain crudity, a certain grip, a certain stickiness or grasping onto something, a particular feeling, a particular way, a particular sense. Grasping of particularity. Here is a shortcut – if you focus on nothing and nowhere, that immediately releases the grip. When you focus on nothing and nowhere, your grip releases. Become familiar with this ungraspable space, openness, having no position, having no center, no point of perception. Just become familiar with it at least for a bit.
When you focus on nothing and nowhere, it’s open. One second, open for one instant moment. You might go back to your cozy environment, which is familiar. That’s okay, but when you build up more courage, you can try again to focus on nothing and nowhere, and in one second, you’re open, that’s it. And what is it, this openness? It is everything, absolutely everything. You’re not even focusing on it; it already IS. If you focus on everything, you have a limited view. Relax, release, and let go. Better to focus on nothing than try to focus on everything.
When you focus on nothing and nowhere, it seems that it is emptiness, space, openness. It appears to be so at first because you were filled up with all kinds of content, and now you are disentangling from the content. Actually, that nothing and nowhere when you don’t focus on it, it’s a very big awareness, self-brightness. We call it the lightless self-brightness. It’s even beyond the light and the dark, beyond duality. It is so intensely bright and light and here, that it’s like 1,000 suns that you will discover as you stay more and more in this awareness. It only appears at first to be empty, empty of content, but later on, you discover more and more the nature of its self-brightness. It’s a place from where everything came into creation; all degrees of manifestations, densities, and dimensions of our universe came from it.
The way is to withdraw your attention completely away and allow it to relax, drop into nothing, and nowhere. That is the fastest way to come back to awareness, to withdraw from all content, from all experiences. That is the meaning of renunciation, it’s not to become a monk, a priest, or a nun. That would be an external experience. The real renunciation is to renounce all content, external and internal. It’s to renounce the universal experiences. Renunciation to withdraw from content, to recognize that all content is within your awareness, already, now, here, and that is so.
Surrender yourself and your content absolutely to your own boundless awareness. It requires no faith. You don’t need to believe in anything. It requires no trust because awareness is already here. You can only trust in objects, forms, energies, appearances, and feelings. These are intermediary steps of renunciation.
Knowing this, you know the highest truth because everything else is experiential; it’s experience, in various forms and diversities. This truth is so simple, but entanglement is quite difficult, because there is an old habit built up of many decades of living in form, and there is even a certain entanglement with an even bigger past, with deeper spaces, extensions of energies into the past. Even past lives, extension into your soul. The entanglement goes all across the universe because the whole universe is experiential. You have to become free from the universe because the universe is within your awareness. Even when you go to heaven, you still need to be free from heaven, because heaven is a nice environment. If you can choose between heaven or awareness, make a wise choice to go to your awareness itself, and be there, stay there, and disentangle anything and everything which distracts you from residing fully in the boundless awareness itself, which is Enlightened Consciousness, God, Shiva, Self. With good practice, with a little bit of help, with some Grace, you can do that.
Developing neutrality is another way, neutrality to your experience, because it’s all happening as it is right now. It is the “isness” of the happening of Now. Even if it’s unwanted isness, it is still happening as it is. The freedom is not to change that, the freedom is to transcend that, to see what is happening. All is happening in awareness itself. And bit by bit you become freer. The degree of your realization is the degree of letting go of holding on to experience. You are a lot closer to your awareness than you can see, or feel, or perceive, or know. You’re much closer than that. You’re closer than seeing, feeling, knowing, and perceiving. You are closer than the experience itself. It’s all happening inside awareness. And wherever you are now in this recognition, it’s okay. It is a good starting point.
You don’t need to push yourself. If something is resistant, relax the resistance, and you will be much closer. If you are within the enjoyment of the current energies, experiences, well, relax even from that. Recognize that awareness is aware of them, too. Gently, of course, you can allow the nice experience to continue, but be beyond experience. Allow it, but be beyond it.
The best tool is to know the truth of awareness, that it’s right here, and then it’s only a matter of time. It’s only a matter of time because you know that, and you can always check it. You will see that whatever happens, you are aware of that right here. Thus, it’s only a matter of time until all these attachments will be exhausted, until all the forms of the food of the mind will be starved, until all the ways that things get sticky will become disentangled. It’s just a matter of time.
You are already enlightened awareness - is just a matter of time until you will come out of your experiences and be free again. As time is relative, it may take a couple of months, or a couple of years, or a couple of lifetimes. That is the degree of your distractions, of your entanglement with your experiences, attachments, and desires, but it’s all subject to time. Awareness is not subject to time, but the experience is subject to time. Time is also perceived in awareness. You can see how time flows. You can see how your life flows.
Residing in the Self, in Enlightened Consciousness, in Awareness, is so direct and alive, it is so immediate, that everything gets penetrated intensely, deeply, alivelessly, and immediately. Aliveness is so intense that every moment is like an eternity. Every moment is so here, so now, experienced fully, absolutely, every single little bit is so here and now! Even your idea about the future is so here and now. The closer you observe what is here and now, the more you see that it is so alive, everything, now, intensely, very much here, all of it - in your self-luminous awareness.