It is really simple, so simple in fact that it is entirely overlooked. Something that simple couldn’t be the answer to the seemingly unanswerable questions about reality. It’s simply not possible, but I have found it to be profoundly true.

My path has always been the path of direct experience, diving into anything that I didn’t want or wasn’t willing to experience. That was the juice in my world. When a fear arose I walked into the swirling darkness and met it. If my stomach clenched and I wanted to run away, I turned and faced whatever it was that had caught me. When my heart went on the fritz I faced my death, one breath at a time.

Why? Because I was courageous? No. I faced it because it was what was appearing in my experience, in what I called the Now, totally unaware that the Now was so much more than I realized.

I dove deep, each time further than I had been able to before until there was nothing I needed to be different in my life. Life was often painful so I felt the pain. It was there. I couldn’t change that even if I wanted to, so I let it tear into me. Life was heartbreaking too, so I let my heart break. Resisting only made it worse so I let it be.

A long time ago I knew that the only thing that mattered was the truth. I didn’t care what the truth turned out to be. I just wanted to know truth, to be in alignment with truth, to live the truth. If all my beliefs had to fall away in order for truth to reveal itself that was okay. If I had to lose everything that mattered to me I was willing. Guess you could say I was a bit crazy, a holy fool. At times I felt like a crazy person complete with a bird’s nest in my hair but that didn’t matter. Only truth mattered.

So I stayed right here, right now and learned to breathe through the onslaught of life.

I think that holy foreplay made the realization possible: I thought that letting life strip away all my wants and desires would open into a new unexplored, pristine truth, a whole new, holy new way of being. It didn’t and it did.

The discovery is really quite ordinary, spectacularly so.

Experience seems to ready us for its totally unexpected revelation. I could never have seen the truth so clearly, could not have accepted its brilliant simplicity so effortlessly without all that came before. Perhaps some can, but that wasn’t the case here.

Experiencing rather than experience, awareness aware of Itself, is the grail. It hides in plain sight as knowing — the knowing of experience. It is so simple it is completely ignored but is the basic element of life, the bottom line, the ground of being.

It is that which never leaves and is always present (omnipresent). Out of body experiences, near death, eating dinner, dreaming, enjoying a sunset — awareness is; experiencing is.

It is all the power that is. It holds within it the creative power of the universe for everything that is arises from it and dissolves back into it (omnipotent). Check it out for yourself. Watch a thought arise out of empty awareness and dissolve back into it or close your eyes and watch the world blip in and out.

It is all-knowing (omniscient) just not in the way we think. Omniscience is normally believed to be having access to the totality of universal knowledge. It isn’t just that. It is the fact of knowing itself. This I Am knows everything. Everything that happens arises and is known by Awareness — as my I and as your I. It is all the same I — the same unlimited, undivided and undividable consciousness — awareness — knowing — experiencing you, me and the world. Check it out and see if you can find a beginning or end, a dividing point in consciousness.

It is Love — total and absolute acceptance of all life, nothing held back, no requirements, nothing needed. It is complete — nothing can harm it, add to it or take anything from it.

Another name for Experiencing is Now, is Here, for experiencing is timeless, spaceless knowing. Everything else is the content of experience, including body, thought and emotion for they too are known by knowing. Another name is I Am.

Simple. Unbelievable to most.

Yet, once experienced as what it truly is … well perhaps you’ll want to find out for yourself.

“You think you have to know stuff. Knowing feels safe in an unsafe world. In actuality, you are limitless intelligence and have access to all the information in the universe when you are empty enough for the new to appear.” Card #1 Out of my Mind – The Wild Child

1Amaya Gayle Gregory