When we discover our nature, we also discover something else: Our nature is all we know and all we have ever known.
How can that be possible?
WHAT I AM
In one sense, am this human being in the world.
And when I look a little more closely, I find I am more fundamentally something else in my own first-person experience.
I find my nature is capacity for the world as it appears to me. My nature is what allows any and all experiences – whether it’s of this human self, others, the wider world, or anything else.
I find that the world, to me, happens within and as my sense fields. It happens as sight, sound, sensations, mental representations to make sense of it all, and so on.
I find that the world, to me, happens within and as what I am.
And here, I find that all I have ever known is my nature. My nature has taken all the forms making up the content of my experience – whether it’s sight, sound, smell, taste, sensations, or thoughts. And whether thoughts label it this human self, others, situations, or the wider world.
Everything I see, smell, taste, sense, think, feel, and so on is my nature. It happens within and as what I am. It’s made up of what I am.
Here is another way to say it: To myself, I am consciousness and the world to me happens within and as consciousness. All I know is consciousness. All I know is what I am forming itself into any and all experiences.
If the oneness we are operates from separation consciousness, then this seems weird, or an abstraction, or imagination, or amazing. And when oneness notices itself, then this seems inevitable. It’s difficult to imagine it could be any other way.
Note: What I write about here is a visceral knowing from direct perception and from living it. It’s not an intellectual or conceptual knowing. I assume that’s clear from how I wrote about it, but it doesn’t hurt to clarify.
INITIAL DRAFT
We discover what was always here: We are what the world, to us, happens within and as.
And we then discover that all we know and all we have ever known is this. All we know and all we have ever known is our own nature.
IN A BIT MORE DETAIL
Through guided inquiry, for instance, Headless experiments and the Big Mind process, we can find what we more fundamentally are.
In my own first-person experience, I am fundamentally capacity for the world as it appears to me and any and all experience.
And I am what the world, to me happens, within and as.
It’s not wrong that I am this human self in the world. That’s how it is in a conventional sense and to others, and even to myself if I buy into what others tell me I am.
And yet, when I look in my own immediate experience, I find something else. I find I am more fundamentally capacity for the world and oneness. And the world to me happens within and as this oneness.
We can also call this consciousness. To myself, I am consciousness. And to me, the world happens within and as consciousness.
This is my nature.
And all I know and have know, and likely will know, is consciousness. All I know is my own nature.
Some say that looking for the divine is like a fish looking for water. It’s swimming in it. It has known it all its life. It’s what’s most familiar to it. And yet it thinks it’s something distant and different from what it already knows. (As most analogies, this one falls apart in that the fish is different in nature from the water, while we have the same nature as everything we know and Spirit.)
BIG MIND DIALOGUE
Can I speak with Big Mind?
Yes.
What do you have to say about this?
I am all I ever know. I cannot know anything else.
At the same time, I know myself as the whole world. The whole world happens within me and as me.
I form myself into the whole world.
If I take myself to be this human self and nothing else, then this seems weird or a delusion. Then I think I always experience something beyond myself. The rest of the world is something else.
And when I notice myself, I realize that to me the world happens within and as what I am.
I form myself into my experience of the world. I form myself into any and all experience.
All I know is myself. Although I know myself in innumerable forms and always in new ways.
All is the same in that it’s all me. And all is different in that any experience is unique.
FRAGMENTS
It’s consciousness forming itself into what I experience, whatever it is. And that consciousness is what I am. It’s my nature. It’s what I more fundamentally am.
….
A DIALOG WITH BIG MIND
Big Mind, what do you have to say about this?