Who is it?
By David Kelso, head of Brutal Training Europe

People build up a mental image of what awareness is, an idea about correct function or create enlightenment into a 'thing' to attain. It becomes some place to move towards, something to ascend to. Who is it that moves towards it or attains it exactly?

People imagine awareness or whatever you choose to call it is a place free of thought, and so they try to stop thought. Who is it that tries exactly? We can’t stop thought. We can’t slow down the stream of thought. That’s not to say the stream of thoughts can’t slow down or don’t become still in any given moment. It slows down and stills of its own accord, and even when that does happen, it’s not something to try and hold onto, or to try and recreate, or think 'that's it’. In one moment thought, in the next stillness, the thing is to not hold on to any of them. Who is it exactly that holds?

Ripples on the surface of the lake do not affect the stillness of its depths.

Thoughts arise as simple as that. Trying to stop them is just further creating a sense of self. It is further giving life to the ego. We have millions of random thoughts a day, none of which are our own. Most people are so very lost in their thoughts, so immersed in them, being dragged everywhere by them. Memories of the past or ideas of the future they are never being truly here in this moment, completely unaware of what is going on in this moment, right now, this very instant inside and out. We can believe we are our thoughts, completely identify with them, with our beliefs and opinions creating and believing in a self image that we try to defend and project on to others.

Can we become aware of this going on? I don't mean imagining yourself as some external observer, a separate entity watching the thoughts. Who is it that watches? This is again just creating a self-image, a sense of self as the observer. Total awareness is just that, being completely aware of everything that is happening in this moment, on your thought processes going on, on what’s happening all around you, your entire experience. And when there is complete awareness there is no longer any experiencer separate from the experience, there just is, what is, what is arising moment to moment, nothing is your own, there is nothing to claim. Because the big illusion is that there is a ‘you’ separate from everything that is arising. There is no doer and nothing to be done.

There is never any separation, only complete expression, right now, right here.

Who is left to express?

The adventure waits…

David Kelso