The great paradox:
intimacy is realized,
separation dissolves,
and yet … we have a poem.
Gratitude to ONE the Magazine
via Facebook
to be a tree
This awareness that the observer is the observed is not a process of identification with the observed. To identify ourselves with something is fairly easy. Most of us identify ourselves with something – with our family, our husband or wife, our nation – and that leads to great misery and great wars. We are considering something entirely different and we must understand it not verbally but in our core, right at the root of our being.
In ancient China before an artist began to paint anything – a tree, for instance – he would sit down in front of it for days, months, years. He did not identify himself with the tree but he was the tree. This means that there was no space between him and the tree, no space between the observer and the observed, no experiencer experiencing the beauty, the movement, the shadow, the depth of a leaf, the quality of colour. He was totally the tree, and in that state only could he paint.
Photo credit: Friedrich Grohe
awareness, meditation and creativity
in a nutshell …
The mind thinks that there is an observer, an independent you,
and that is what is doing the observing.
But really there isn’t someone who is observing.
Consciousness is conscious.
Awareness is aware.
Observing is observing.
– Adyashanti
More from Adyashanti:
Milosz, Lawrence, Einstein and Adyashanti on nondual awareness
In a similar vein:
carse, katz, and the vast view
everything is this Knowing
There is no observer.
Experience is self-knowing.
Awareness is not observing experience.
Experience is awareness.
Perceptions are awareness.
They are not happening to someone.
The happening is its own knowing of itself.
Everything is this Knowing.
To the mind it seems there is an observer or receiver of experience.
Everything self-liberates into itself.
Image: Dennis Cordell
dennis cordell at the artisans’ gallery
the subject is the echo of its creator
the awakened eye 