There is something inherently gratifying about the rare moments when your independent, I-can-do-it-myself child seeks your help to keep them safe. These moments are precious because they appeal directly to the protective instincts built into every parent. It warms my heart when my own seven-year-old wanders into my bedroom in the middle of the night asking if he could sleep next to me because he saw a nonexistent bug in the dark. Even if it means interruption to an already interrupted sleep, I cherish these times when this self-assured, boss baby of a kid feels scared and trusts me to defend him from frightening things in the sweetest way only little kids are capable of.
But he pulls this heart-warming move, not before nearly stopping my heart by appearing quietly by my bedside in a silhouette like a character from Conjuring. Whispery voice and gentle pats can in no way be interpreted in the right context when they happen in the dead of the night. I wake up in a panic, debating if I should be annoyed or sympathetic, and in an ironic twist end up relying on his comforting presence to help me calm down. Over the years, I have grown incapable of a decent sleep because a part of my subconscious is tightly wound every night in anticipation of this midnight jolt. But, the last time a similar scene unfolded, there was something different about the whole experience.
My recollection of this night starts with my mind abruptly coming online from what felt like a dark curtain. I opened my eyes from a dreamless sleep with my alertness going from 0 to 60 in a heartbeat and just as I wondered why I was awake, I noticed my son quietly walk into the room in the dark. I did not wake up in a shock to a nightcrawler, rather I felt woken up by something subtler as if I was being cued in on the upcoming disturbance.
Every one of us is familiar with this sort of happenchance, cosmic synchronicity between our intuitive knowing and the events of the world. We know it by many names like a coincidence, gut instinct, original ideas, or creativity, but never as what it really is – Awareness, the unchanging, ever-present background upon which our ever-changing, impermanent thoughts, feelings, sensations, and perceptions come and go. In fact, it is easier to identify Awareness in small, tangible packets like an occasional creative outburst or a one-time premonition, rather than know it as the omnipresent element beneath our every experience.
Awareness shows itself through gaps between thoughts or in the awe of the starry sky, in the appreciation of art or the pause before clarity. Extreme despair or instant ecstasy, Awareness is all there is. Yet it is near impossible to isolate the eternal and pervasive Awareness, bring it to the foreground of our experiences, and directly enjoy the perpetual peace that it has to offer.
Awareness cannot be narrowed down and experienced like a sensation or a thought because it has no objective qualities. In String Theory, vibrating strings that are the one-dimensional, last stop component within every elementary particle are not made up of anything but they are what make up everything. Similarly, Awareness is the fundamental essence with which every experience is known. It cannot be seen as a tree or known as a thought because it is the substance in which the tree or the thought appears.
“Whatever it is that knows objective experience can never itself be known or experienced objectively. It can never be known or observed as an object. It is the knowing element in all knowledge, the experiencing in all experience.”
Rupert Spira
When I look at the tree and realize the thought ‘t-r-e-e’ in my mind, the reality of the tree is not happening out there in the world but it is being experienced here in my Awareness. I can hug that tree as tightly as I want to make it feel real, yet the sensation of the rough, woody bark scratching my inner arms that makes me think the tree is real is only a sensory perception that is being experienced in my Awareness.
Every object, thought, and perception of the world can be known only in Awareness. It is Awareness that gets the first taste of any experience, but following closely on its heel is the mind arising in the form of a thought that interprets, labels, and splits the experience as an individually existing “object” and the one experiencing it as the “subject”, thus creating duality. A world seen in this way in bifurcation as knower and the known is an illusion. In fact, the world is real but the mind saying that it has an individual reality separate from Awareness is the illusion.
Ironically, recognizing this truth was a disturbing moment for me in my spiritual journey. The significance of this understanding hit me hard when I realized that if the world I see through my mind is an illusion, then so are my children who are also a part of the illusory world.
It breaks my heart to think that my own veiled, limited mind can only know my precious sons as separate from me, refracting them through its filters and faulty perception while they should really be known only as God’s infinite being. I hold my children in my heart of hearts with a love that aches so much that it almost feels like sadness. I claim that I love them with all I have and assert the virtues of an archetype mom filled with unconditional love, but do I honestly know what any of that feels like? Do I know what it means to carry these precious beings in a love that they deserve to be carried in?
For all the love I feel for my children, I should hold them, not just in my heart but in a place closer than that. I should only see them from the inseparable essence of pure knowing. Where else can I know them as such, if not in Awareness?
“It is thought that says knowing takes place here and the existence of objects takes place out there. But for awareness, knowing and being are the same thing. Awareness never experiences things as “things”. It knows things much more intimately than that. It knows everything as itself. This inseparable intimacy is known as love.”
Rupert Spira
