The nature of experience cannot be truly understood unless the form of experience is first seen clearly. “An Introduction to Awareness” is a philosophical journey that takes the reader into the heart of the presence of nondual reality – a reality in which the “spiritual” world and the “actual” world are not separate; in which the “physical” reality of science is a practical and imaginative construction of causal mechanisms imposed by us upon the spontaneously creative, uncaused, manifestation of Nature – a way of thinking about the world that is useful for manipulating it, yet which is not truly real. But this practical way of seeing Reality comes at a great cost; one that we suffer from every day because we have come to see ourselves as causal mechanisms too. We have accepted the mythology of science that asserts that we are separate from what we experience, that the forms of phenomenal existence are the serendipitous concretions of haphazard activity, and that the nature of a thing is nothing more than the mathematical expression of its statistical probabilities – that Nature has no soul. We have allowed this tool of thought – science – and this simplification of reality – mathematical modeling – to overwhelm the truth of our presence here and now – this alive presence that we have come to think of as our physical person acting in this physical world. What we are is Awareness. Awareness is not some attribute that our bodies have; instead, it is Awareness that manifests our bodies and this world – Awareness is the soul of Nature. It is this irrefutable truth that is used as the starting point for the journey on a path along which our ideas about existence and self are analyzed and shown to be erroneously constructed out of a most basic misunderstanding of what experience is: the error of believing that we are objective observers of a separate world that we experience. It is not an easy thing to change how one views the world. It is, in fact, a very difficult thing to do. Conceptual thought is part of the nature of being human, yet we forget that concepts are merely imaginative models of reality that simplify what is real. We can be misled by these concepts, as we are misled by the apparent independent reality of things. But it is possible for each one of us to have the necessary insight to overcome these errors – to use reason to undermine its own erroneous conclusions – on its own terms. This book shows another way to view the world, another way to construct your thoughts about it, in order to realize the wholeness of reality, while still retaining the practical means of living that the modern world has given us. It teaches you how to use concepts in a way that does not endanger true understanding.
Posted on: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 00:15:29 +0000
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