I thought awakening was all about bliss and joy. It’s much deeper than that. Much richer and fuller than that.
It’s about experiencing Life as it is, being Life, with no separation, and experiencing the totality as beingness itself. It’s quite ordinary, actually.
I can walk through a public crowd as no one, as pure awareness, like a camera going this way and that, exploring and witnessing and loving and appreciating what is seen. The camera is not affected by what is seen, nor is there any judgment as to what is seen. Just pure seeing, and a causeless Love inherently intertwined with that which is seen, arising from nowhere.
Love seems to be the pure energetic relationship that integrates with that which is witnessed.
There can be engagement of the body/mind with that which is witnessed, or not, and it really makes no difference. Pure awareness, witnessing itself, seeing movement and stillness, with no real necessity to do or be anything in particular except be that which I am, which is a given.
Movement and stillness are one. They’re actually the same thing.
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Clara Llum is a spiritual teacher who found herself going through a process of spontaneous enquiry very early in her life, revealing the Self as the Unlimited One back in the 1970′s. Since then she has explored most eastern traditions, become familiar with many approaches to awakening to Truth, and begun delivering Satsang in 1986.
Today we will be sharing this interview where I asked her a whole bunch of questions about awakening.
Interview Topic Highlights
· What is Enlightenment?
· Misunderstandings about Enlightenment
· The value of Beliefs on the way to Realization
· Brief visits to the Self vs. Full Realization (non-abiding vs. abiding awakenings)
· The Law of Attraction and choosing better feeling thoughts
· Quieting vs. Silencing the mind
· The role of the mind
· Not knowing vs. doubting
· The most important thing to know to reach Enlightenment
For the sake of clarity, my questions will be italicized while Clara’s responses will be in bold.
Our conversation begins with us noticing how animated and alive we often are when we express ourselves.
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How’s this for a wonderful little play on words? 
The other day I was listening to a youtube video and there was a blip in the recording to where the words “me” and “ego” got mashed together and sounded like “mego.”
How perfect! An ego is like a mego! It’s like people have their own little mego’s running around. Do you have a mego?
Wait.. a mego? Amigo! A friend!
The ego is like your friend. He wants to keep you safe, give you advice, and alert you of danger in the world. He’s like a lookout, but sometimes he can be a bit overprotective and paranoid. Have you noticed that?
The problem is that we think we actually have to listen to our friend all the time. In fact, we’ve listened to him so much that we’ve forgotten that we are actually here listening to him independent of the words, and have effectively handed over our decision making to the chattery friend doling out protective advice!
The thing is though, we are not our friend. We are the one watching our friend talk. We are the one listening to our friend speak.
You are not your amigo. You are the one aware of your amigo being who he is.
Your amigo is your friend, here to help you separate yourself from perceived danger, but your amigo is not you. You don’t have to kill your amigo. Just recognize you’re not him and he’s not you.
Simple say, “Hey, I’m not that voice in my head. Not a single thing that the voice in my head says is actually me talking. Here I am, listening, and there is my friend, talking. If I want, I can simply stop listening and pay attention to something else, like the listening itself. I can be more interested in awareness itself, which is what I’m doing, than the words that are being spoken, for the words being spoken by someone else. The words I hear are never what I am! No thought or idea can ever actually be who I am. Here I am, regardless of if my amigo understands something or not! Here I am!”
That’s it. Complete and total disidentification with the little voice in your idea.
You are not your amigo.
You are that which is aware of your amigo.
Consider this: From the linear perspective of time, with your five senses you can not perceive what is actually arising in the present moment. It’s technically impossible.
Everything you’re seeing happened a fraction of a second ago or more. It takes time for light to travel from what you’re looking at to your eyes. Thus, you are not actually seeing the present, but the past. You’re seeing something as it existed some time ago.
When you look up in the sky at the sun, you’re not looking at where the sun is now, but where the sun was 8 minutes ago. When you look up at the stars at night, you’re not looking in the direction of where the stars are now (if they even still exist and haven’t exploded since), but where they were hundreds, thousands, or even millions of years ago!
The same applies for sound. It takes time for sound to travel through the air and vibrate your ear drums. So again, you are not perceiving the present, but the past.
What about taste and touch? Perhaps they’re different because in order to experience those senses, you have to be in physical contact with the object. Thus there’s no delay as the vibration travels through space to your body.
Well, it takes time for the nerve’s impulses to travel through your body to your brain so that they may be perceived by the mind. This process too takes time.
To recognize this more clearly, why is it that when you touch a hot stove, you almost instantly pull your hand back? That’s right. Reflexes. Your body knows to pull your hand away before the signal makes it up to your brain, is processed as pain and danger, and the brain then sends a signal back to your arm to pull your hand away. Thanks to our reflexes, physical responses can happen even before mental perception.
Perception takes time. What we perceive is actually the past. You can not perceive the present moment with your physical senses. It’s physically impossible.
Perceiving in Time and Space
With your senses, you’re clearly not perceiving the entire universe at once. It’s like you’re only perceiving a tiny fraction of all of time and space at a time.
What you perceive at any moment depends both on where you are and when you are there.
If you change when you are in a particular location or space, what you perceive in that space changes. You can’t just be in the right place, but you have to be at the right place at the right time.
Similarly, if you change where you are physically relative to any object, what you experience about that object at any point in time will be different. For example, if you’re far away from a loud noise, you’ll hear it later in time than if you were really close to it. Thus, when you experience something totally depends on where you are in space.
Time and space are inseparable. They truly depend on one another. This is why people call physical reality a time/space reality or refer to time more accurately as spacetime. You can’t have one without another.
What you are perceiving at any particular moment in time is not actually what is arising in the present, but your own version of the universe, depending on where in time and space you happen to exist at any moment. It’s almost like being in your own little world! 
Thus, if you want to experience the Now as it is in its pure and undistorted essence, if you want to see Reality as it actually is, a deeper part of yourself must be awakened, a part of you that exists beyond time and space. It is what is Here and Now.
Awareness, Here and Now
As long as we approach the the Present moment through the content that arises in the present, we will always perceive the past. We won’t be experiencing the Now.
Even if we think about the future, we’re looking at a thought that arose in the past, but we’re looking at it now. The looking happens now. What we are looking at happened in the past.
Let me repeat this because this is so important.
The looking happens now.
What we are looking at happened in the past.
As long as we look to experiences, memories, or perceptions, we’re not seeing the Now itself, but rather the mind’s stuff that happened in the past. The mind exists in past and future, and yet awareness is seeing whatever it is seeing, right now.
The content was created in the past, but awareness is seeing it now.
Right now, Awareness is looking at these words, regardless of when they were typed or when they showed up on your computer screen.
Awareness is aware of this moment. There is a big difference between awareness which is aware, here and now, and the content and experiences that arise within awareness.
Awareness is present. Awareness is always present. It is impossible for awareness to not be present.
The only thing awareness can be aware of is what is, here and now.
It’s not something to think about. It’s not something to understand. Thinking and understanding are all more mind-stuff that arise within time, are subject to time, and exist simply as passing content within awareness.
All satori moments, glimpses into your true nature, sudden realizations, feelings of oneness or love.. they’re all experiences that arise within awareness. None of that is what you are. None of that is it.
Connecting with Who You Are
To connect with who and what you truly are, just be.
Be still.
Rest as awareness.
It sounds utterly simple, and it really is.
Just rest as the timeless awareness that is here and now, for that is what you already are anyways.
By looking consciousness straight in the eye, it will come to know itself clearly.
This remembrance, this reconnection to the I Am that I Am, this is the foundation of awakening.
Consciousness is peering into this world, but it is not of this world.
Awareness is like this witnessing presence that is looking through this body/mind, like a watcher of a movie looks at the screen of a movie and is immersed in the sounds and colors.
But awareness is completely independent of the movie.
Rest as awareness.
There is nothing to understand. There is nothing to figure out. Just simply be. Be who you really are. Be still. Be.
So part of this spiritual path involves moving from fear towards love, becoming more and more loving.
The past few days I’ve allowed myself to be in my ego. To be angry. To feel my deep sadness. To experience this energy that for so long I’ve been trying to run away from, transcend, transform, heal, or in any way shape or form change. This egoic presence something I haven’t experienced in quite a long time, much less embraced.
I’ve decided to stop running from anything that is within me. Whether this fear is me or not me is not of primary importance right now. It is here, and I’m not going to run from it.
Diving into my own anger, I’m noticing one fear arising in particular: If I allow myself to experience my darkness, I’ll somehow slide back into my ego and become totally unconscious again, like some sort of crazed psycho killer or something. (Gotta love how the mind works…) A high degree of unconsciousness basically the complete failure for what one would call a spiritual person.
Looking at this more closely, we see that this fear is actually afraid of itself. It’s fear afraid of fear. The ego afraid of itself. It is a self-sustaining and self-reinforcing mechanism.
If you’re afraid of experiencing you’re own fear, noticing your existing fear will bring up more fear, which will create more, which will create more, and so on.
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There’s this sense of deep peace that arises, where it feels like nothing’s happening. Everything is still, completely and totally still.
This isn’t to say that the earth stops spinning, that time stops, and that life as we know it ceases to occur, but something deeper than that, somehow beyond it all.
It’s a sort of looking through the action and seeing the non-action, peering beyond the content of the moment and recognizing the emptiness of the moment itself.
Nothing is being created.
Nothing is happening.
Nothing is occuring.
This probably doesn’t make much sense to the mind, so let’s see if we can help it along here a bit.
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