In the same way, the body that originates in happiness is a happy body from the experience of happiness. It is still pregnant, if you will, with the presence from which it emerges.
It is not any kind of thought that has this quality. Some thoughts originate from ignorance. Some thoughts are just old thoughts that just come back to the surface. They are not fresh, creative, new thoughts. So the thoughts that are really pregnant happy thoughts are the creative thoughts of understanding, thoughts of love – because thoughts of love come from the experience of love. The thought of understanding comes from intelligence. These are the happy thoughts.
Typically, as a truth-seeker, to be practical, I may be driving and all of a sudden my thoughts drift to something I’ve read, something I’ve heard in satsang, and I experience as a result a joy which is causeless in fact. It’s not like being based upon a Ferrari or something tangible, it’s just the joy to be, the joy that there is being. The joy that there is being is not related to me as a person.
You can have it in the morning – you look at the sun, you look at nature, you look at the sky, and you feel this joy. This joy is not about you – this little ant in this huge landscape. The joy of marveling at all this extraordinary being that is deploying this extraordinary scenery. And you see that when there is true joy, true happiness, there is nobody in it. It is for the sake of itself. And as soon as little me comes in and says ‘Oh oh, I am here enjoying this thing, but unfortunately I’m not always going to be here enjoying this thing’ – it poops the party.
The ‘I’ that experiences happiness is consciousness itself. There are not two consciousnesses – one to experience consciousness, and the consciousness which is experienced. It is consciousness that experiences itself – that’s a very important point.
We usually experience in terms of the senses, and mostly, in fact for most of us, in terms of the sense of sight. Of course some of us experience, if you’re blind or if you’re a musician, you tend to experience a little more in terms of sounds. If you are a dog, you tend to experience in terms of scent. But we experience in terms of the senses.
So when we try to experience consciousness, the natural tendency is to project a look-alike of consciousness in the mind, which is a concept, which is an image – perhaps something transparent, or a mirror, or a blackboard, or a white wall or something of that sort, - or a localization in a bodily sensation. So it’s something that has some kind of a shape, some kind of a structure, even if it is a vanishing one, it still has some content.
The experience of consciousness is not of the mind. And we know the experience of consciousness. We have not recognized that that which we experience as happiness, of love, or beauty, or understanding, or humor for instance – all of those are in fact the experience of consciousness. They have this quality of being impersonal, of being timeless.
How long does it take to understand a joke? You see what I mean? Jokes that are delayed – you can spend days before you can understand it, and all of a sudden, you’re walking down the street and ‘Ahhhhh’ and you start laughing. But it didn’t take days to understand the joke. These days, they don’t count, because during those days you were not understanding the joke. The only thing that counts is the very instantaneous moment when you get it, when you get the punch line and bingo. And so it is the same here.
So this experience of truth, of love, of beauty – it has this timeless quality, that first appears as instantaneous, no duration, but then appears as presence, as something that is always here – you know like consciousness is always in the background so to speak. It’s always in the background, but when you look at it, it takes no time to look at it. If you ask yourself ‘How do I know that I am conscious?’ – of course consciousness is in the background, but how long does it take to realize that you are conscious? No time – it’s an experience that is instantaneous. So it is analogous in this case to the experience of truth, love, beauty, understanding, being touched by love, being touched by beauty.
There are things that may happen before. You look at a painting, or you listen to music, and you are taken by it, and all of a sudden you cry. Or understanding, you look at this problem, you don’t get it, you don’t get it, and then, all of a sudden (snaps his finger) bingo, that’s it.
To go back to the point I was making, it is important to have been informed that the experience of consciousness knowing itself is not at all like a visualization of some blank wall, or like a feeling in the body like something which is here (pointing to forehead) or something which is here (pointing to chest). No.
It is more like the experience of love, of happiness, of understanding. If you think about it, every time you experience love, you’re happy; every time you experience understanding, you’re happy; every time you experience beauty, you’re happy. So what these experiences have in common is happiness. And what they have in common also is that they are the experience of consciousness.
So the experience of consciousness is identical to the experience of happiness. That’s important because then, we are not kidding our self as a truth seeker by trying to have the experience of consciousness, trying to visualize consciousness, to see it. No, no, no – that’s not what it feels like. It feels like happiness. So if there is no happiness, it’s not consciousness. You see, that’s important. If it is dry, if it has no flavor, if it has no perfume, it is not consciousness. It is something else. It needs to have this freshness, this happiness, this quality of perfume, to be the authentic experience of consciousness." Francis Lucille
Rupert Spira on this topic: http://www.johnlovas.com/2016/05/awareness-of-awareness.html
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