Take a look at the room that you sit in

Just notice how there is an automatic registering of all that you see in the instant that you see it. The instant registering happens even before you gave names to what you saw. It is effortless to see the objects in the room- the walls, floor and ceiling. It is automatic, immediate and natural to actually see. No one needed to teach us how to see. No one can take away the actuality and effortlessness of this seeing. The living activity of seeing does not need to be maintained, mastered, developed or figured out. It simply is. It lives us without 'us' being there. We don't need to plan how to see the wall in front of us, nor do we need to understand what we see for the activity of seeing to take place. Our seeing is a given. It is constant and untouched by thoughts or ideas about it. 

Similarly to the effortlessness of seeing, is the recognition that we Are. This recognition is as ordinary, common and inescapable as seeing the wall, is. Who we are is so obvious that we overlook it, or take it for granted. Registering the objects in the room is such an unavoidable and constant reality that we miss the essence behind it. We mistakenly think that the labels and definitions of the objects that we see are what they are (including our own image in the mirror). 

In our ignorance, instead of recognising the immediate invisible pure-intelligence that enables us to register images, we focus on what the images (objects) mean to us and on the self-image (subject) of the one we believe sees them. When we identify with self-image we say, "It can't be that the truth of what I am is so simple and self-evident." Thinking that it is too simple we look outward and reach for a high that seems to come with extra-ordinary phenomena. 

Instead of attending to the fact of our being we hold on to the act of seeking and hoping that it will reward us with the promised happy future. We think we can have mind-flavored based experiences to know a no-thing. Yet, a thing (which is what the mind is) as Sailor Bob says, cannot know a no-thing. So, given what we discovered here, lets take another look around the room that we sit in and watch how the seeing is all that is happening. There are no separate things that are seen, and no separate person that sees them. There is simply the actual, effortless seeing that lives all by itself, free of duality, free of conditions. We are that one immediate seeing. We are the things that we see, and we are the Oneness that is living as the seen and the unseen. 



- Brian Lake & Naama Livni
NonDual Highlights 3065