Spontaneously Present

Your awareness. Your awakeness. Your ability to think and feel—not what you’re thinking or feeling, but the actual, innate ability to do so. Your ability to perceive. This is awareness.

Can you get rid of it? You didn’t put it there. Your parents didn’t put it there. Nobody put it there. It is spontaneously present at all times. It’s what you perceive with. It's not the perception, but the experiencer or perceiver of the perception. It’s not the thought, but the thinker of the thought. It’s not the feeling, but the feeler of the feeling. Awareness.

These thoughts, feelings, and perceptions going on in your mind—it seems like you’re having them. There’s a you, an awareness, and then a bunch of thoughts and feelings that you seem to possess.

This is the original oops. We don’t have original sin in Buddhism like some other religions do—we have original oops: a slight misperception called duality.

Since all of these thoughts, feelings, and perceptions are arising in your mind, experienced by your awareness—which is not other than your mind—you can’t really separate awareness from mind.

So these thoughts and feelings and the awareness—they’re not different. They’re the same thing: the experiencer and the experience. And experiences are made up of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings—a big tangle, all woven together.

You are your experiences. You’ve changed since you were six, right? What changed you? You had some experiences—and they changed how you see the world. They changed who you are in the world. How you react to the world. Everything about you has changed.

You are made of your experiences. You are not separate from them in any way.

And remember, we’re using the word experience to refer to that whole entangled web of thoughts, feelings, and perceptions that arise together—and that are made of nothing other than thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. None of which have a moment’s duration or an atom’s solidity.

So how can they trouble you?

Knowing this intellectually isn’t enough. What changes you is experience, right? You have to know this experientially. So that the pattern that names itself “you” changes—shifting until it matches the pattern that knows itself as primordial Buddha, Kuntuzangpo, beyond time and space.

But you don’t do this by trying to change your patterns or improve yourself. Because it is already spontaneously like that—completely natural.

You do this by learning to relax more and more into the natural state—the meditation of non-meditation—where path and fruition are the same – Dzogchen, completion stage.