Can you spot who is aware of reading these words?
Will you try something right now, before anything gets explained? Can you notice that these words are being seen? And can you turn around, quietly, and spot the one who sees them? Is there a face there, a shape, a someone — or does the search come back with nothing to show?
Would it trouble you to hear that nobody has ever found the one who looks? Could it be that whatever looks can never appear in front of itself, the way a torch cannot shine on its own light? Has who you think you are ever managed to experience anything at all?(opens in new tab) If the finder cannot be found — not once, not even by the sharpest attention — what does that failure quietly prove?
Why can nobody explain the fact you are most certain of?
Is there anything you are more certain of than being aware right now? Could every other belief be doubted — your name, your memories, the world itself — while this one stays standing? Is it not strange, then, that no scientist, no philosopher and no scripture has ever explained what this awareness is or where it comes from?
Do the honest researchers not admit it themselves, when they call it the hard problem — the one riddle that refuses every instrument? Has any brain scan ever shown the experience itself, rather than its traces? If the most certain fact in your life is also the least explained — what kind of fact is it?
Where exactly is your awareness?
Can you point to it? Is it behind your eyes, as the habit says — and when you look for it there, do you find awareness, or only more sensations appearing inside it? Is it inside your head at all — or is your head one more appearance inside it?
Does it have a left edge or a right edge? Does the room appear inside your awareness, or your awareness inside the room — and have you ever actually checked? If everything you have ever experienced showed up within it, could it have an address of its own — or is it the placeless space every address shows up in?
Can you remember ever becoming aware?
What is your earliest memory — and was awareness not already there, receiving it? Can you recall a single morning when you switched it on, or has every morning simply found it already running? If every beginning you know of appeared inside it, what would a beginning of it even look like?
Do you feel a day older at the very centre than you felt at seventeen? Has your body aged while whatever notices it stayed exactly as it was — and would anyone believe you if you said so out loud? If it does not begin with your memories and does not age with your body, whose calendar is it on?
When Job demands to know why he suffers, why does the reply come in the form of seventy questions?
Do you know what happens in the oldest poem of suffering, when Job finally gets his audience? Does he receive the explanation he demanded — the accounting, the reasons, the justice? Or does the whirlwind answer him with questions only — where were you when the foundations were laid, can you bind the stars, did you give the horse its strength?
And is it not the strangest turn in the whole story that seventy questions, with not one answer among them, are what finally quiets him? Would seventy questions be enough to quiet you too?(opens in new tab) Might the questions themselves have been the audience he was begging for — the proof that something vast enough to ask them had been listening all along?
Can you activate your awareness?
When you woke this morning, did you start your awareness the way you start the coffee machine? Can you turn it up by trying, the way you tense a muscle — and when you try, does anything change except one more effort appearing inside it? Has it ever once waited for your permission?
So if you cannot switch it on, cannot turn it off and never earned it — in what sense is it yours at all? If it is clearly not your doing, could it be the one that is always behind you?(opens in new tab) Would that explain why it never left, even in the years you forgot to ask?
What word rises in you for something with no place, no beginning and no off switch?
May I gather what the last five questions left behind? What has no findable owner, no explanation, no location, no beginning and no switch — and is still the most intimate fact of your life? What single word do those properties call up in you — and did you notice that one just rose, unasked?
Should you trust that word, or doubt it? Does it matter which tradition taught it to you, when what it points at is right here, nameless, reading a page? Could the word be smaller than what it names — and might that be the only thing wrong with it?
Can you stay — just for one minute — as the one who only notices, and let every question go unanswered?
Could you put this page down for sixty seconds and simply be what notices? Is anything easier — and did you still, somehow, not do it? What pulled you back — a thought about the minute, a plan for after it, an opinion about whether it was working?
In the seconds when you did stay, what was missing? Was anything lacking while you only noticed — any age, any wound, any unanswered question? If one minute of this is already complete, what exactly were all the years of seeking supposed to add?
Why am I still after an answer that I know will never come?
Shall I answer the question you are probably asking by now — do I live in that stillness myself, beyond all questions? Would you be disappointed to hear that I am still asking, thirty years on, most days before the day properly starts? Why am I still after an answer that I know will never come?
What else could I do — is there any other way I know of moving on in this life? Is asking not the very way this aliveness stays awake in me? Are you interested?(opens in new tab) And when you look up from this page — what is looking through your eyes right now?