Through The Eyes Of A Non-Dual-Seeking Protagonist
Lights! Cameras! Suffering!
Let’s get down to some good old repetition. Let’s look at this present moment. Let’s call this entire present moment experience – the totality of all that’s happening right now, all those sights and sounds, thoughts and sensations – let’s call it an experience. It is one thing: an experience. The present, the totality, all there is, is made of the self-same stuff and is very much the self-same thing: it is an experience. Put all those sights, sounds, thoughts and sensations together and hey, it is this: an experience of being a person in a world.
One thing: an experience: an experience of being a person in a world: the present: the awareness of being present: consciousness only.
Like a dramatic, immersive, big budget (or maybe small budget) first-person perspective movie, all the elements of the experience – the lighting, the scenes, the perspectives, the dialogue, the action, the opening and closing titles, and on and on – are made of the self-same stuff and are very much the self-same thing: the movie, the experience, what’s happening in and as the present. You can get lost in it, you can jump in shock, cry in sadness and smile in joy, get moved along with the ups and downs of the protagonist – but hey, it’s a movie appearing in your awareness. It is something, the experience, the known, all there is, happening now, the present, appearing in the nothingness of pure knowing.
You can get immersed in it, identifying as the protagonist, seemingly moved by it, but nothing ever touches you. You are the knowing of the experience. You stand apart from the experience, as the knowing; and the experience is nothing but that knowing of it, nothing but that knowing ‘I’ that you are.
This present moment, this knowledge that says you are, that you are present, is the experience of looking through the eyes of a protagonist – the one who’s seeking the knowledge of their true identity, of reality – lost in thoughts of being the person on the screen. What advice would you give to that person, that persona, that mask in the play of life, the universe and everything? How would you help that person to wake up to what is?
What is a person? What is a human being? What is a protagonist? What is there for that persona to do?