WE, THE CONDITIONED

Awareness — The Zen Place Is Right Here

Then Why Is It So Hard To Experience It?

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 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 this means interruption to an already interrupted sleep cycle, I cherish these times when this self-assured, boss baby feels scared and trusts me to defend him from frightening things in the sweetest way only little kids are capable of.

Soppy Scene, Not So Soon

But he pulls this heart-warming move, not before nearly stopping my heart by appearing quietly beside my bed in a Conjuring-like silhouette.

Whispery voice and gentle pats can in no way be interpreted in the right context when they happen in the dead of the night.

So I always wake up in a panic, debating if I should be annoyed or sympathetic.

And in an ironic twist, I end up relying on his comforting presence to help me calm down.

Over the years, I have grown incapable of 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.

When Life Cues You In

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, a cosmic synchronicity between our intuitive knowing and the events of the world.

We know it by many names like 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.

This is the substrate underneath our every experience — the knowing through which we know all the things around us. It’s a layer of calm upon which the chaos of our mind and its thoughts unravel.

It’s this Awareness that every esoteric teaching asks us to go past the noise of the mind to touch.

Every guru and every enlightened soul is where they are and who they are because they’ve known this Awareness.

Reaching this state and existing as this state is called meditation.

But it’s not as easy as going from point A to point B.

So Close Yet Not So Close

Every object, thought, and perception of the world can be known only in Awareness.

But Awareness cannot be narrowed down and experienced like a sensation or a thought because it has no objective qualities.

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.

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.

Awareness cannot be experienced because it’s what experience itself is made of.

Seeing this clearly is the first step toward recognizing Awareness.

“While the picture appears on it, the screen remains invisible. Stop the picture, and the screen will become clear. All thoughts and events are merely pictures moving on the screen of Pure Consciousness, which alone is real.”

— Ramana Maharishi

We, the conditioned, is an ongoing exploration of the self from the bedrock up. It involves taking a telescopic view of the world — politics, people, et al., along with a microscopic view of the self — mind, thoughts, and perception. It’s about hacking away the fluff around spirituality, seeing reality for what it really is through the lens of philosophy, and learning what we really are beneath all that we think we are.