This transcript was made by speech-recognition software, so names and some words may be misheard. The recording is the original: watch on YouTube.
The awareness must be the constant. The other comes and goes. So when the other is coming and going and seemingly going, carrying on, and you say, I've lost awareness, could that really be possible? It's like you lose the focus, if the right word is that. You lose the focus. You lose awareness of the awareness. Awareness is self-aware. It doesn't need anybody to be aware of it. You don't know what it's like to lose it. Even now you say to yourself, I've lost it, it's obscured, it's gone away. But could it have ever gone away? Could anything appear without it? How could you know it wasn't there if you weren't aware?
That question, you know, who is it happening to? Just having that question changes the whole equation. . . . And in looking, looking, well who is it that we're to? You can't find anyone there. And it's interesting that the story that the emotion is there and it's lingering on, even though I may not be telling the story about it, it relates to that story of the snake, the man who steps on the rope. The body still has the state still there, but he's seen that it's not really a snake. And because that emotion is still running through the body, then the mind will start up another story, so it gets back into it again.
It's like fainting off each other. Yeah, it's a vicious circle. But in just, you know, the mechanics of it, you can't really talk about mechanics, but it's as if, you know, like what Bob says, the energy of belief goes into whatever the belief is, and it's seemingly real. But if you remove that energy flow of belief, then the mind will start to think, and the energy stays as the seeing or the knowing. And it's immediately seen that this thing is not real, and it's already fading, it's already losing. That's why you can never find the me, because as soon as you look, it's already disappearing.
Not that it was ever there, but I think, you know, we need to understand what's actually happening. But the question, who is this happening to, is a great question. Where is it to? Sometimes trying to locate it, when you try and locate it, it doesn't have a location, so it just disappears. It's actually a thought that's recreating it. So by thinking and looking for, looking for where it is in the body, let's say, because you say you feel it in the body, try and find the location, it just falls away, because there isn't one. The point is that it's non-conceptual. It's non-conceptual awareness. So in an ordinary way, all we have is this commentary and these thoughts, sort of going on and on, and we believe that they are real.
The central character in that story, the story of me, is keeping that thing going. But the awareness is non-conceptual. That's the seeing. And everything appears in the seeing. And because there's one without a second, everything is part of that one. Well, there are no parts, but... Yeah, but it's all, it's all, even if it appears as appearances, when you examine it, it's all the same thing. It's all just that one without a second. It's not divided into subject and object. No, no. So even saying this is, like this is the unchanging and that is the changing, they're all still the one thing.