“In reality there is only the source, dark in itself, making everything shine. Unperceived, it causes perception. Unfelt, it causes feeling. Unthinkable, it causes thought. Non-being, it gives birth to being. It is the immovable background of motion. Once you are there, you are at home everywhere.”
~Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
By Georgi Y. Johnson
(This article was first published by Nonduality America)
It began with a simple inquiry, arising some seven years after what many would call enlightenment. It was an inquiry born out of a sense of incompletion, experiential curiosity, and a movement of grace that arose in perfect alignment with the need of individual destiny.
The inquiry is into the ‘here’ and the ‘now’, or more precisely, into the ‘here’ which contains and supports the ‘now’. Where is ‘here’? Where am I? How does the here and now (space and time) take form in all that I am?
Just as the ‘now’ can lead to a rapid awakening, culminating into a liberation into a space of pure, non-verbal ‘being’, the ‘here’ seemed to be a great, unanswered signpost to the source.
What unravelled is a potent trilogy of perception, in which consciousness (the waking consciousness of mind and spirit) dances with awareness (the felt sense, sentience, or being), within the great non-duality of emptiness.
“The menu is not the meal.”
~Alan Watts
I AM HERE unveils a trilogy of perception through the windows of consciousness, awareness and emptiness. In this, the ‘I’ is consciousness, the ‘Am’ is awareness, or feeling sense of being, and the ‘Here’ represents perception through emptiness.
This is an invitation to inquiry. Is it the same perceptive window that releases consciousness, as that which unveils the awareness within our non-verbal being? Does consciousness of consciousness lead to the same expansion as the refinement of awareness, for example in the awareness of loving awareness? What is that which runs through and behind both perceptive windows?
Can we inquire into the differing impact of the Now and the Here? Is there a separate flavor to the experience of peace and that of love? Can we recognize that bliss is different in sensation from the feeling of ecstasy? What is passion? What is unity, true unity, through every layer, expression and experience of form?
As we realize each existential aspect of being here now as non-absolute, a liberation occurs in which we are able to channel these aspects according to the needs of the whole through any moment or situation.
Much of the I AM HERE message is about language, which gives the building blocks of thought, which can give the signposts to experience. The language we use in discourse on non-duality will define and perhaps even limit our ability to communicate with precision. Words, used without a depth of responsibility, can create subtle prisons.
As Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj taught, perception is not absolute, either as consciousness or awareness. It could well be the energy that emanates through all forms in creation, but in itself, it is not an end point.
“Perception doesn’t define who we are. Yet it does define where we are limited, and where we are not yet free.”
