When I was a young child, I was taught to believe that my consciousness was limited and was “inside” my head—it was specific, and it was mine. When my neighbor, Barby, and I lay outside on the grass on a humid summer evening looking at the full moon, we were two consciousnesses—hers and mine—staring up at one moon. Of course there could only be one moon!—a physical object, I was told, made of dense matter, rotating at a far distance around our planet earth. Two people, two individual awarenesses, one moon.

I did not question this apparent reality for six decades. In fact, I was so inculcated with this belief—as is our culture—that it didn’t even dawn on me that it could be questioned. It remained fact.

Until it was seen as fiction.

When this crazy life of ups and downs, loves and hates, successes and failures palled, when the shine wore off—even the special shine from my spiritual path of almost forty years—I was pointed toward questioning everything, and specifically, everything about myself that I believed to be true. In the Fall of 2008, my whole belief system fell away, never to be replaced. Since August, 2009, searching outside of myself ended; noticing—the natural state of awareness—moved into the foreground. I have been examining my direct experience very closely ever since, and this has blown apart anything and everything that I thought to be true. It has been at times terrifying, disconcerting, a giant relief, and more recently, simply what is.

I have experienced that all I know of the world is my awareness of it. Remove tasting, smelling, hearing, seeing, touching, sensing and perceiving, and the world, as we think we know it, no longer exists—although “awaring” remains: knowing that I am, and that I am aware.

Now when I stand outside with my husband and stare at the moon, there is one eternal consciousness, and two apparent moons occurring within it—each seen through a unique and very temporary body-mind.

From where we look makes all the difference.

© Amrita Skye Blaine, 2012