And the way to this simplicity is to recognize the centrality and the significance of true nature. Whether we recognize it as presence or awareness or emptiness, true nature is crucial to the process of awakening, realization, enlightenment, and liberation. It is the source of all spiritual experiences, insights, and transformations. There is no other source. Nothing can happen without it. All our various experiences are nothing but true nature manifesting in one way or another. This is one of the most important wisdoms that arises in the third and fourth turnings of the wheel.

So our orientation toward experience needs to be one of learning. No matter how painful, pure, or wonderful, all experiences are good when approached with a correct attitude. Approaching an experience with the attitude of learning is an ultimate attunement to reality. Learning this attunement to reality is a challenging process that requires us to approach our difficulties with humility and detachment. The work we do here is not religious in the traditional sense. Although religion recognizes, in some sense, the balanced attitude toward experience, our work is more basic. Ultimately, we work from an understanding that is the source of religions, sciences, and philosophies, that is the ground of objective knowledge. Even the perspective of service is different in this work from religious perspectives of service. Our notion of service has to do more with objective reality, with the laws of how the universe functions. For us, service is more of an attunement to reality, an attunement to the truth, to how things are destined to be, to how they can be in their fullest realization. There’s no idea of serving in order to be a good person or to please God. We serve from a deeper kind of love, from an attunement to our objective function in this world.

Experience ordinarily includes various kinds of psychic operations, all simultaneously present and functioning at different levels in experience. There is consciousness, then there is differentiation, then there is discrimination, and then comes labeling. They all go on at the same time but are interrelated in a nearly instantaneous chain of arising. As soon as labeling begins, ordinary knowledge comes into operation. The act of labeling creates the link that associates information from the past—ordinary knowledge—with what is occurring now in your experience, that is, with basic knowledge. When you recognize that your consciousness has inherent in it a discrimination that is inseparable from the capacity to discriminate and is prior to labeling, you are recognizing basic knowledge, which is the ground and the basis of all experience. From basic knowledge arises every kind of knowledge, experience, insight, and action.

Objectivity about an experience or situation includes recognizing and understanding our attitudes and reactions to it. We need to inquire into our inquiring consciousness until it is impartial, balanced, unprejudiced, disinterested, motiveless, goalless, fresh, and totally open to finding out whatever is there. Only when our consciousness approaches experience this way can it apprehend objectively. Being objective about an experience means that I’m open to it; I am not trying to make it go one way or another. And this is not because I think that’s the way I ought to approach it, but because I have no vested interest in things going in any particular way. I’m not trying to get something; I am merely curious, I love to find out what is so—that’s all. Accompanying this open and open-ended inquiring attitude is an impartiality, a balance, a fresh attitude and orientation, an objective, inquiring mind. If I approach experience with an aim or a plan, this is bound to interfere with whatever I’m exploring. I won’t know it objectively, for what I come to know will always be mixed with and distorted by my own subjectivity. When we can be objective about our experience—or at least be aware of our subjectivity in the process of our inquiry—then it is possible for us to see things the way they truly are. Hence, learning to inquire includes learning to be objective.

Being real happens when the noise has subsided and the complexities dissolve and we are experiencing ourselves just as we are in our true condition. Not the reflection, not the picture, not the echo, not the memory, not the thought, not the reaction, but the thing itself. Usually, we assume that reality is full of all kinds of sounds and noise, and we believe most of what we hear. We focus on what the noise is saying or else we are busy responding to it —defending, justifying, reacting, explaining, judging, thinking, planning, remembering. But those activities are just the reflections of what is real. Being real is what we are, what we truly are, and we experience it in the moment. And being real doesn’t require that we experience anything in particular. It is more about the way we are being, rather than what we are being. It is like the difference between hearing one thousand loud noises and hearing one single note, simple and gentle, which makes us feel closer to who and what we are. Closer to our heart. At that moment, we feel that our heart is alive and tender. Our heart has its tenderness when we are feeling ourselves. We recognize ourselves in that tenderness, in that nearness to what is real.

We end up being paranoid in some sense and afraid of our own experience. So, if we are scared of our experience and even of the possibilities that might arise in our experience, how are we going to learn to be real, to be ourselves? How are we going to learn to see exactly where we are and be there—abide where we are—when that might include experiencing danger or perhaps a condition that we think will invite danger? “If I let myself be where I am, what will happen to me? I will be jumped on.” That’s why we automatically defend ourselves. You don’t have to be walking around in an unsafe neighborhood to be afraid for your own safety. You could be in your own room and still not feel safe. What I am saying is that you are defending yourself there, too.

By discriminating the various elements of experience clearly, you can see their individual significance and the significance of their interrelationships. For instance, you might be feeling heavy in your chest. Discriminating that sensation clearly, you might recognize that you’re also shaking, or that you feel a little nauseated in your stomach. Then the recognition can manifest, “Oh, I’m anxious”—and you realize that what you have been feeling is the energy of anxiety. The meaning of these three interconnected experiences—the heaviness, shaking, and nausea—arises as insight, but that insight includes the direct knowingness of these three elements. But the insight brings in a fourth element, which is the direct recognition of the feeling of anxiety. The insight reveals the presence of anxiety. So there is discrimination, knowingness, and also a comprehension or recognition of the meaning and significance of the totality of the experience. Knowledge can be a knowingness of one element, so it can be a static picture, but understanding is not static, it is always dynamic. As you are feeling the heaviness, the shakiness, and the nausea, they interact and begin to change. The shaking might move from your arms to your chest, and this may decrease the feeling of heaviness. Perhaps the shaking becomes connected with your nausea, and as that happens, you become more directly and specifically aware of the anxiety. The whole picture is always changing. It is a dynamic flow. So understanding is the entire dynamic flow of the comprehension of the knowledge that is discerned in experience, and is also part of that experience. Understanding means that you’re fully aware, wholly cognizant; you are in touch with your experience and completely aware of its meaning and significance.

If you look at your experience at any moment, you will see that it is a kind of knowledge. Experience is inseparable from knowledge, and is in fact, completely knowledge. Experience is so intertwined with knowledge that you cannot say, for example, “My knee hurts,” without the knowledge that you have a knee, what a knee is, what hurt is, and the various other pieces of information that constitute your experience of the knee hurting. All of this is knowledge.

The experience of featureless reality is quite ordinary; everything is simple. Life goes on as usual, except there is no fixation on or stuckness in one view or another—existence or nonexistence, self or no self, dual or nondual, happening or not happening. We are just not concerned about these kinds of determinations. We live our usual life without the Velcro of attaching or fixating in any ultimate way. The total openness of featurelessness is a kind of pure not knowing. The experience is “I know. I know that I know. But I do not know what I know.” Reality is not ultimately determined by any feature, which allows it the freedom to experience all features. The experience of featureless consciousness is timeless and spaceless in the sense that it is not patterned by concepts of either time/no time or space/no space. We perceive the passage of events without having to identify with the concept of time. We experience dimensions of space without any persisting sense of here and there. Our experience has no sense of size or location, quality or color. Featureless true nature reveals a consciousness that is conscious of itself but devoid of thought, differentiation, conceptualization, and recognition. It is a pure and undefined consciousness that is free of the concept of consciousness. By calling it “consciousness,” I am referring to the fact that there is experience, which is so indefinable that we cannot refer to it as either presence or emptiness. How can there be consciousness of something that has no definable features except for consciousness itself? It is a pure and complete absence of mind. Although featurelessness is friendly to features—which can be and ordinarily are present—they do not pattern the featurelessness. Featurelessness is both beyond mind and can coexist easily with mind, because it does not have any feature that opposes or negates mind.

We might think that nondual experience is the real thing because it seems to have no conditions, and is free. We can experience the nondual condition as one field that is manifesting everything, as one field that is being aware of everything, as a pure awareness or presence that experiences everything as its own luminosity and presence. The nondual condition, also called the enlightened condition, is free in terms of being free of suffering, but it is not free, as we have already seen, of certain positions or concepts. In other words, we can experience true nature fully without necessarily being free of all delusion and ignorance. We can experience the nondual condition and, at the same time, ignorance or delusions can persist as concepts we do not recognize that are patterning the experience. And the primary concept that patterns the nondual condition and makes us think that the nondual condition is the true condition of reality is the concept of nonduality itself.

In making this kind of connection, we recognize something common to all our experiences—that they are not truly of the moment; they are colored by our past. We can see the veil, the wrapping that our consciousness has put around itself, which has become an interference. We recognize that the dynamism of our Being is not completely free; the total openness that invites experience to arise freshly, just as it is, is missing. We sense that our experience is occurring through old, musty filters that create a dullness and a darkness. We often talk about being here in our ordinary experience. And of course, we are being here in some sense. But what does it mean to be here in the first stage of self-discovery, when there is no direct sense of essential presence? All it means is that I am feeling what I am feeling and I am not overtly trying to change it. But I am not being there yet! How can I be there if it is just an idea of me who is there? All I can do is to be aware of what is happening, to feel it, to recognize it and not fight it.

So the first thing that needs to be penetrated and understood here, that needs to be given up and metabolized, is our notion of having an experience. Because as we enter the dimension of Divine Love, it’s not a matter of “Oh, here I am, about to have another experience, just like I’ve been having experiences all these years.” Maybe all your experiences have been like that so far on this path; perhaps you’ve had deep experiences of essence and being, and seeing the wonder and even experiencing divinity, right? So there you are, seeing God, or God talking to you or something like that. But to really go into the dimension of Divine Love is a whole different thing. It means this whole stream of having experiences is going to quit. It’s like there’s a program that’s been running in your operating system, which is self-registering: I’m having experiences of various things—now this one, now this one, now another one, and now this one. Right? And then it comes to the point where that program is going to quit. It’s not going to be registering any more perceptions. And the fear here is that there won’t be any experience if that quits. Or if there is experience, it’s not going to be mine. It is somebody having an experience as long as the universe of consciousness is being funneled into a particular locus of consciousness. It’s like the individual having an experience of the boundless dimension operates as a kind of sphincter, constricting the flow of universal consciousness into what feels like their own particular experience. But when that sphincter is completely relaxed and the funnel is dissolved, then there is only the presence that is there, which is universal consciousness, unconstricted. And at this level we recognize the quality of this consciousness as pure love.

Because there is no inner content, not even sensation, there is nothing to reflect back on. The moment we reflect on ourselves, and look inward, there is nothing to perceive. Our awareness simply comes back to awareness of “external” phenomena. In other words, in the experience of ourselves as the absolute there is no self-reflection; in fact, the possibility of self-reflection disappears. Reality has a front and a back, phenomena are the front and the absolute is the back. However, since the absolute is actually nonbeing, Reality becomes simply the front. There is no back. There is no back to reflect on, no inside to look into. We are the freedom of the world, the liberation of all manifestation. Alternatively, there is total absence of self-consciousness, on all levels and in all senses of the word. There is no awareness of self, and no knowing of this lack of awareness. This phenomenological absence of self-awareness becomes a psychological or emotional absence of self-consciousness. We cannot be self-conscious, because there is no self to be self-conscious and no self of which to be conscious. And without self-consciousness there are no personal issues or conflicts, no personal suffering. The most interesting part of this lack of self-consciousness is the experience of spontaneity. Without self-consciousness there is no self-watching and no cautiousness about our expressions and actions. There is no premeditation and no rumination about what to do. Hence we are totally spontaneous, like young children.

During the course of engaging the spiritual path, it is difficult to practice without a goal and without motivation. But as the practice becomes subtler and deeper, we realize that intention is not necessary, a goal is not necessary, motive is not necessary. Not only are they not necessary, but if they remain, they will obstruct the arising of reality. Recognizing the ways in which our practice is limited by our aims reveals further subtleties of practice. In this teaching, we come to understand, especially in the nondoing practice, that we don’t want to do anything to our experience. It is not only that we don’t orient toward some goal but also that we don’t act on that orientation. To do something to our experience means that we have some idea or hope or desire for something different to happen. We don’t want to do anything to our experience because our true nature is presence, is Being. Being doesn’t do anything to itself—it simply is. So when we recognize that our nature simply is, that our nature doesn’t divide itself such that something does something to another part of itself, we see that to take the position of doing anything to ourselves in order to get someplace contradicts our true nature. When we recognize that contradiction, we see the folly and the misalignment of our normal sense of doing.

Of course, when you let yourself be, as you let yourself sink into reality, you might experience unpleasant things; but these are simply the barriers that stop you from being. In time, with Presence, they will dissolve. You might experience discomfort, fear, hurt, various negative feelings. These are the things that you are trying to avoid by not being here. But they are just accumulations of what has been swept under the rug of unconsciousness; they are not you. They are what you confront, on the way to beingness. When we acknowledge and understand these feelings while being present, they dissolve, because the idea of ourselves that they are based on is not real.

What inquiry does is show us this meaning. We see that everything is interconnected—one fabric of revelation. With that understanding, we are able to recognize what is being revealed. When we get the revelation, we can’t help but feel satisfied and capable of valuing our experience regardless of how painful or difficult it may have been. We begin our journey of inquiry feeling that we value our experience because we have learned from it; we say that we have grown from it. That is true, but it’s just a way of explaining it. All that our learning means is that we are getting closer to the self-existing value. When we recognize the self-existing value, which is True Nature itself, we recognize that the fact that we have learned, that we have grown, is a side effect, a reflection of the true value and meaning of existence. Yes, the meaning first appears as relative, but at some point we recognize that the meaning is us—all of us. So it doesn’t matter what is happening in the moment. No moment is better than any other moment. No one’s experience is better than another person’s experience. Your experience in the moment is the way True Nature is teaching. It is not accurate to say, “That guy is at a more advanced place than I am, so I should be like him.” You are comparing yourself and making a judgment that your experience is not as valuable—and so the sense of your own value is lost. No, your experience is the right teaching at that moment for you, and for the rest of reality, too. Your experience is just as valuable, just as necessary, as the experience of somebody supposedly more advanced on the path or having more sublime experiences. The more we learn that each moment has its own intrinsic value, the easier it is for us to let ourselves just be in each moment, however it is manifesting.

We need to remember and be aware that it’s not simply the experience that matters, but how we relate to it. If we approach our experience with an attitude of greed, the experience will likely be used to feed an endless emptiness that can never be filled. But if we approach our experience with a balanced attitude, the experience could expose that bottomless chasm without indulging it. So our orientation toward experience needs to be one of learning. No matter how painful, pure, or wonderful the experience is, all experiences are good when approached with a correct attitude. Approaching an experience with the attitude of learning is an ultimate attunement to reality. Learning this attunement to reality is a difficult process that requires us to approach our difficulties with humility and detachment.

If you consider the nature of your own experience in the light of all we have discussed so far, you can notice certain things: That your experience is always changing. That your perceptions are always changing. That where you are is always changing. It becomes clear at a certain point in our practice that our consciousness is manifesting itself as constant change and transformation. It moves from one kind of feeling or thought or reaction to another, from one kind of state to another. But have you noticed that it is never a disconnected succession? As long as we are awake, our experience is continuous. It is always a flow of experience. It’s not that we have one particular experience and then there is a gap followed by another experience and then another gap. There are no gaps, really. Our experience is a seamless flow. Even when we go through a transition from one dimension of experience to another, it’s still a flow. Because it is really the same consciousness that is constantly unfolding, constantly transforming. That’s why our experience is often likened to a stream or a river. So “being where we are” does not mean finding where we are and staying there and that’s it. Being where we are is a continuous practice in the sense that as we continue to be where we are, where we are changes and transforms. Thus, being ourselves, being who we are, being where we are, becomes a continuity of being—the flow of being.

Our experience of what is happening is not of what is actually happening. Actually when you perceive, the impressions, sounds, sights, or sensations are new—they’re one hundred percent new as they happen. But we don’t see them in their newness, we see them through our concepts about the various kinds of impressions. Not only do we see them through those concepts, those concepts automatically evoke emotional associations and feeling tones. So our experience is not a pure perception, but the thoughts, feelings, and memories that our concepts bring in. We have an experience only in the present moment, but that experience is not really an experience of the moment. Your experience is already your own interpretation of the moment. This happens every second. We never, or rarely, allow ourselves simply to perceive. These associations arise simultaneously with the concept, projecting a past situation onto the present and conditioning how we view an experience. We do not necessarily respond to the immediate experience, but to the experience as it is filtered through concepts, memories, images and associations. Seeing a present situation as similar to a past one, we tend to react automatically, decreasing our ability to assess the present situation freshly. Bound to the past in this way, we cannot perceive the vast range of alternatives available in the present and so diminish our options for action.

Let’s take a look at how the nature of the primary and secondary components of our experience differ according to what stage of the journey we are in. In the first stage, the primary component and the secondary component tend to be similar. The primary component might be an emotion, such as fear or terror or happiness, or it could be a sense of deficiency or a particular pattern or self-image. The secondary components might include fear or rejection of the sense of deficiency, judgment or shame about a particular self-image, or commentaries and plans about whatever else might be arising. We learn through the process of inquiry how to discern the two components and distinguish them from one another. First, we need to recognize a reaction as a secondary component and not as the primary event. The recognition of any secondary component makes clear what the primary component is. That’s why we always want to include both in our inquiry. Because if we don’t see our reactions, we’ll never know what the primary component is.

But the significance of any experience is our mere presence, nothing else. The content of any experience is simply an external manifestation of that central Presence.

So our experience is not knowledge in the usual sense of knowledge. It is not what we call ordinary knowledge—the information we have in our minds that we remember about things in the past. It is knowledge now. Basic knowledge is always direct knowledge in the moment—the stuff of our immediate experience. We usually don’t call it knowledge; we call it experience, and if we are a little more sophisticated, we call it perception. Perception carries more of the sense of being aware of your immediate experience, which is the palpable sense of knowingness that is basic knowledge. Our usual perspective is that there is experience and then there is knowledge about it—the knowing is separate from the experience itself. And sometimes the experience happens without any knowing at all; it seems to come and go, and we are clueless as to what happened. However, the fact is that there is no experience if there is no knowingness; otherwise how could you say there is an experience?

Under normal circumstances we experience ourselves only partially. We do not experience ourselves as we are in ourselves, in our authentic reality or essence. Instead, we experience ourselves through thick veils of ideas, ideals, beliefs, images, reactions, memories, desires, hopes, prejudices, attitudes, assumptions, positions, identifications, ego structures, labels and accumulated knowledge—in other words, through the influence of all of our past experiences. We literally experience ourselves through the past, through the totality of our personal past, instead of freshly, in the present moment. Only when we have experienced another way of knowing ourselves is it possible to appreciate the enormous effect all this mental baggage has on our normal experience of ourselves. We see, then, that our awareness of ourselves has become so fragmented, so indirect, so burdened by mental accretions, that even what we take to be authenticity is only a reflection of a reflection of our innate and fundamental authenticity.