Understanding the Nature of Awareness: You Are More Than Just a Person

If you are watching this right now, you are one of more than 8 billion human beings alive on this planet at this moment. In this very minute, roughly four people are born every second, and about two people die every second. So since I started this video, a number of people have come and gone. The numbers are so vast that each of us as a person seems incredibly small and insignificant, and yet notice something very simple. As a person, you’re the most important person in your world. Your joys, your fears, your memories, your hopes, they matter more to you than anyone else.

The Flickering Nature of the Self

But look closely. This most important person is flickering. Now here, as this thought now gone, now here as this emotion now gone, now here as this body sensation now gone. The person is an ongoing appearance. It's a process. It's a verb, not a thing, not a noun. Every moment your body changes, your brain changes, your story updates, just like your iPhone updates. The you of a few breaths ago is already a memory. The you of a few breaths from now is only a projection.

The Constant Presence of Awareness

So what is constant? Beneath the flickering person there's something that does not come and go. There’s a silent presence that is aware of every change. Thoughts rise and fall in it. Emotions surge and fade in it. Bodies are born and die in it. We call this presence awareness. As awareness, you're not just a separate individual moving through time. You're the field in which time appears; you are the knower of the field in which everything is known.

Timelessness of Awareness

As Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gītā, “I’m the field and I'm the knower of the field”. Kṣetra Kṣetrajña. That's the true I am. Memories arise in this field as images and stories, and they recycle and evolve as persons. Versions of you and me, but the field itself is timeless. It does not age. It does not come, and it does not go with the body. It is simply now.

Continuous Flow of Existence

Right now as we speak, hundreds of new lives are beginning on this planet, and more than a hundred lives are ending. This is a continuous flow of appearances, bodies, minds, relationships, histories. From the viewpoint of the person, this is birth and death; from the viewpoint of awareness, it is a single seamless movement within one infinite field.

A Practical Experiment in Awareness

So let's look together directly, not as philosophy, but as an experiment. Pause, now allow your attention to rest just for a moment on whatever is happening. Sensations in the body, sounds around you, thoughts passing through, feelings that may be here. Notice how everything you can experience is changing, but also notice the fact of being aware is not changing. Awareness is already here before any thought about me. It is here before the story of your past. It’ll be here after this sentence that I'm speaking out loud ends.

The Precious and Impermanent Self

As a person, of course, you're entirely precious and entirely impermanent at the same time. As awareness, you are the open, boundless field in which this precious, impermanent person appears when the person flickers. Now here, now gone. Awareness remains like the sky that is never harmed by the passing clouds.

Recognizing the Timeless Field

What happens when you begin to recognize yourself as this timeless field, rather than only as the flickering character within it? Fear of death softens, clinging to any fixed identity begins to relax because there’s no fixed identity anywhere. Compassion naturally deepens because you see that every one of those 8 billion other people is another expression of the same awareness looking through different eyes.

The Infinite Nature of Awareness

That which looks out through this eyes and that which looks out through your eyes and 8 billion others is the same awareness. So right now, you don't have to get rid of the person. You don't have to transcend anything. Just notice that the person is appearing in you in awareness, not the other way around. The more you notice this, the more life reveals itself as a play of forms in a changeless, formless, now.

You Are Both the Flicker and the Field

You are the field and the flicker. You’re the wave and the ocean. As a person, you’re here briefly, like a single breath. As awareness, you are the infinite space that allows every breath, every birth, every death, and every universe to appear. And that timeless now is what you are. You’re both the flicker, the flickering, and that which flickers.

Aham Brahmāsmi, Tat Tvam Asi, Sarvam Khalvidam Brahma.