Event updates…
From October 29th to December 17th, my dear friend Dena Evans and I will be co-facilitating an 8-week Zoom group, exploring the nature of reality using as our springboard, another of Peter Brown’s books (either his first book, Dirty Enlightenment: The Perfection of Imperfection or a new book, Liberation Beyond Imagination, slated to come out next month). The weekly meetings will take place on Tuesdays, 10 am to 11:30 am Pacific time. There is no cost for the group though donations are welcome. To register, email: john@johnastin.com.
WHAT’S PERCEIVING
As you sit here, gazing upon whatever you’re gazing upon, I invite you into a simple but profound question: What’s looking? What’s seeing this moment? Don’t try to answer it analytically; simply feel your way into the question. Feel what’s looking through these eyes, what’s perceiving this moment. What is that? What is seeing? All that’s appearing, the incredible display of life, what’s beholding all of it? Regardless of what’s being perceived, just ask yourself, what exactly is it that’s perceiving?
Let yourself relax into what’s seeing. Whatever this mystery of what’s looking is, simply feel that. And as you do, see if you find any “thing” definable there.
Notice how boundless, how open-ended, what’s perceiving is—how it has no edges to it and no clear location. We could say that what’s perceiving is “here.” But what does that word even mean? Where exactly is here? Doesn’t here only make sense if there’s also a “there?” And if you could even locate a there, wouldn’t that also be here?
Feel the sense of being here and notice that it has no clear edge or boundary to it, no line separating a supposed here from there. What’s perceiving and what’s being perceived have no fixed location.
As you feel into whatever it is that’s perceiving the moment, notice how you cannot find any clear line dividing what’s perceiving the moment from the moment itself, no separation between the seeing and the seen. You just find seeing.
We can split the world of experience up as the perceiver, the function of perceiving, and the objects being perceived. We can talk about it in such ways. But if you feel what’s here, you don’t find those three things. You just find a flow of perceiving.
Feel the spaciousness of this perceiving, how alive it is. What’s perceiving is not static but dancing, just like everything that’s being perceived.
While there’s really no way to describe it, we could say that what’s perceiving through our eyes is reality itself—the universe seeing itself, pure intimacy, with zero degrees of separation between the perceiving and the perceived. You don’t find a here and there, an inside and outside. You find a seamless, undivided whole.
This runs so counter to our conventional notion of being a subject, who is perceiving an objective world that is somehow apart from us. It’s a persistent belief and certainly one way to experience life. But there is this other, undivided perspective that’s revealed when we simply feel what’s present rather than assume we already know what is here. In this perspective—the perspective of experiencing itself—we don’t find two things but only this inconceivable flow of experiencing.
Feel how from this perspective, there’s not anything to be found nor anyone to find it. There is just the marvel of experiencing, the absolute mystery and presence of it. From this vantage, things are not happening to us. There is just this amazing happening, this bright, shining, unknowable happening.
Feel that: the vast borderless universe gazing through your eyes. That’s what we are feeling. Nothing but that. We might imagine a person peering through these eyes, but what we’re feeling is boundless indescribability. Luminous. Awake. Sparkling. Present. Immediate. So fleeting and ungraspable in its appearing and yet, paradoxically, always here.
Beautiful, John!!! Gorgeous and clear. ❤️
Beautifully spoken, edgeless love