Are we all different facets of awareness?

Are we all different facets of awareness?

Dear Rupert, 

I came across your site today and found deep resonance with your words. I have recently come to the understanding beyond any doubt that who I am is this awareness in which the body, mind, people, the world, everything arises. In fact, I have never not been this and, by the same token, I realise everything is only it.

Yet this question arises: While there is no doubt that I am awareness, am I not a facet of awareness, different from the facet of awareness that you are? As far as my experience goes, your awareness doesn’t even exist, yet the mind knows there is a facet of reality which arises in the awareness that you are but not in that which I am.

Is it this the same thing as the distinction Hinduism makes between the concepts of jeeva Atma (individual soul) and Param Atma/Brahman (the ultimate reality), with the two being found the same in the final analysis?

Thanks,
Himanshu

 

Dear Himaanshu,

You know that you are awareness and not a mind, body or world. This awareness cannot have any objective qualities, because an objective quality would, by definition, belong to the mind, body or world. Such a quality would arise inawareness but would not beawareness.

Therefore, to know yourself as awareness means to know yourself as having no objective qualities. How can something that has no objective qualities have a limit, or a facet? What would such a limit or facet be made of if there is nothing objective ‘there’ from which it could be made?

Love is the name we give to the experiential understanding that awareness is inherently free of all division, facet, border, limit, and so on. It is without finite borders and ever-present – in other words, it is infinite and eternal.

The jeeva Atman is the individual entity which upon investigation is found to be utterly non-existent. It is not, therefore, that the jeeva Atman is the same as the Param Atman but rather that there is always only the Param Atman, pure awareness, ‘I’, seemingly sometimes veiled by the arising of dualising thought and appearing, as a result, as an imaginary separate entity (the jeeva Atman), but never actually being or becoming anything other than its own eternal, infinite self.

With love,
Rupert

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