What Is This Sense of Beingness? - 5th February 2021
Saar (Essence)
Ananta clarifies that while attention can reach the subtle 'hum' of beingness, the recognition of awareness itself transcends all perception. He guides the seeker to honor both the divine presence and its absolute source.
Attention can only traverse your being; it cannot go beyond the primordial vibration of presence.
The question 'Are you aware now?' bypasses all perception and transcends the need for attention.
Do not intellectualize awareness as superior to being; both are pristine expressions of the same holy source.
devotional
Transcript
This transcript is auto-generated and may contain errors.
Now, okay, my question is a little subtle. It's connected to the attention, yes, because until now I always found... I thought I've been following Guruji's pointing for some years now and I always try to fix the attention on the Self, to use the attention to go inside or something; you can call it like this. And what I found is mostly the sense of presence. It has some bodily qualities; it's like I'm aware of the breath and the sense of being. For me, which I could find by attention, it has always something a little bit phenomenal. Guruji once called it 'the hum of being,' I think. And now, following your pointings, I'm finding out there's still something behind this sense of being or this little phenomenal thing about being. I can still watch it—or 'I can watch it' is maybe not the right expression—but I am still somehow aware of even that. I would call it awareness of the sense of being, and this has really nothing phenomenal anymore.
So it came to me when you said with attention, as far as I understood, with attention you can only find something phenomenal. It was a little bit the point I was struggling with all the time because this what I could find with attention inside, it had something phenomenal, something bodily. It was some kind of empty, it was quiet, but it always had some little phenomenal quality like the hum of the body or like the breath or something like that. And now I see even this is seen; even this is recognized by, let's call it, awareness. Yes.
Okay, thank you. Thank you for this question. It's very nice, very good one, and will allow us to look at some things very clearly. So let's really investigate this. What can happen when we send attention seemingly inside, then you're absolutely right, using Guruji's words, that you come to this sense of beingness, the sense 'I am,' which Guruji has beautifully said is the hum of the being. It's like the just almost quality-less, and yet you can call it a presence which is coming into our attention, coming into our focus. So that hum of the being is there.
So what is this sense of beingness? This beingness actually is everywhere. Everything that is perceived, you see, is within this being itself. Intuitively, this insight is coming to many of you also. You find that as you're coming to this being, you're finding that it has no boundary, you see? It has no boundary. And yet when you go deep within yourself, you come across this pulsating vibration, primordial vibration, you see, which is very primal: the sense of I am-ness, the sense of beingness. So that very being which is everywhere—in fact, every awareness is included in that being—that is that space in which this space manifests. That seems to have some centrality, for want of better words, like a pulsating vibration of being, you see. Whether you call it I am-ness, whether you call it Om, whether you call it any other words that define its divinity.
So this is at the cusp of all that is phenomenal and non-phenomenal. Between the cusp is this primordial vibration. So it's coming face to face with the prime vibration of divinity itself, and it is very, very pristine. It is very beautiful, you see. So when it comes to what can attention bring to us, it can bring us all the content of this being, which is the regular manifest world, you see. And when we look at its very source, including the source of attention itself, the maximum we can get to is to come to this sense of presence, the sense of beingness, you see. More than that we cannot go with our attention. That's why I said it's the cusp of the non-phenomenal and the phenomenal, the primordial vibration, you see. More than that you cannot go.
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So I would not call it something to do with the body or something to do with a specific person. It is pure divinity itself because it is in this light that the light of the sun shines. It is in this light that you are perceiving this entire universe, you see. So that is one extreme as far as attention can go. It can go to the objective world and it can go to this more subtle, you see, the primal vibration. Looked at in another way, it can go from all kinds of colors and light and sound to pure darkness, pure absence of any light or sound, you see. That is the extent to which attention can go. And that is why this is the subtlest thing you can reach at with your attention, which is the sense of presence, which is not the entirety of your being obviously, you see. It is not the entirety of your being because everything is being. Everything that you can point to is only within your beingness, you see. You can never escape your being with attention. Your attention can only traverse your being. You may feel like you're sending it to the next room, you're hearing some sounds from the street, you're reaching out to the past and looking at some memory, or you're projecting some ideas into the future, but all of that is just attention traversing your very beingness, you see. It's all part of the play of your being. All time, all space, all of that is in your being.
Now, when a question like 'Are you aware now?' comes, attention cannot help you, you see, because the subtlest it can go to is this pulsating vibration of being, you see, the primordial. And that is a pristine place, and yet even in that pristine place, you see, attention cannot go beyond because that is the subtlest perception it can ever have. So in the practice of staying with the sense 'I am,' it's a pristine practice because you just let go of all your worldly duality, desires, and doership and just rest in the presence of this vibration. And then just naturally that presence itself will lead you to its very source. But with the question like 'Are you aware now?', just without needing to have any perception, any use of attention whatsoever—either outside or inside, seeming outside and seeming inside—it just transcends all of that perceptual requirement and just, without having any dependence on attention, with eyes open: Are you aware now? Yes. Eyes are closed: Are you aware now? Yes. You see? So it is independent of what perception there may be. You come to this insight independent of attention.
This is also my experience, what you would say. Because if you ask yourself, or if you try—and you told us you can also try now—I try not to be. If I try not to be, there's a strong feeling of presence or being, but it carries this kind of hum of existence. But if I ask myself or if I say to myself 'Am I aware now?', it's just like a bypass to everything. It's just... there's no more this, there's just complete... I don't know how to call it, but it's different. There's no not even the subtlest feeling of a hum of being or something like that.
And yet, don't make the mistake of making sort of a mental position about it, saying that, 'Oh, the being is something inferior and what I'm finding through this is something superior,' because that is just again in the intellect, you see. So what a beautiful satsang in which we can talk about these very pristine topics. We are talking about the enormity of the primordial vibration, which is the divine, the play of divinity itself, you see. And that from which even that appears—even that appears from that source which is the absolute awareness, you see.
So in my heart as Ananta, I would have the deepest reverence for this holy presence that is here, you see. You know the holy presence that is here, and of course the deepest reverence for its very primal source of even that. So don't let your mind say, 'Okay, that is like the halfway house of my discovery and this is my full discovery.' It's something like you in the presence of your presence, you see, you have transcended the world and all of its problems already. It is just such a great beauty that we can even speak about going even beyond that, you see, which is so pristinely beautiful. In fact, in most Indian forms of spirituality—in fact, most forms of spirituality all over the world—getting to this presence is the final step. It is the final step, and they're not wrong, because the presence then takes care of whatever else has to be taken care of. So, so grateful to Guruji for pointing us to this pristine awareness, seen insight into this absolute awareness. All through his grace that we can even contemplate this together. Thank you. Thank you.