Foreigner
Bluelighter
Let's start with meditation then and observing your thoughts. This won't lead you to the truth of reality but it will develop a tool you need to begin the work: the skill to see that you are pure consciousness that thoughts arise from, but your identity is not the thoughts.
Then, once you interrogate where those thoughts come from, I mean truly come from, without more stories, it's likely you will start to see what pure consciousness is.
This happens naturally when you fall to sleep. You're not dead, but the story of "you" ceases. You're just awareness. Then when sleep ends, you wake up and the story of "you" starts up again. Where did "you" go and how did "you" come back? Where did it come from? Who is the one that thinks it's a you?
Or maybe you have a dream, a dream in which you may be you, another person, or nobody. The dream feels real, so real that the "waking" reality you were just living doesn't even exist to you. Then you wake up from the dream and another dream, what the average person calls "reality," becomes apparent. You identify with it, just like you identified with the dream you were having, and go about your Samsaric life.
But who is the one having the dream?
The only thing real in a dream, is the dreamer.
Those thoughts aren't there 24/7. There are times in your day when there are no thoughts. You are so used to identifying with thinking and mind that you don't even notice the little moments when no thought is arising. Like when you pickup an object to use it without thinking... like when you reach for a glass of water. Those actions that have no thoughts, who is the one doing them, if not the thoughts, if not the personality who thinks they are the thoughts? Samsara is a dream and nobody is actually doing it -- only a thought makes it seem so.
Pure consciousness is the foundation of all thoughts. Even when you have a memory about the past and the memory seems so real like you're living in the past, that memory is happening now.
Pure consciousness is blissful because it is serene and peaceful, but it is neither positive nor negative. You could be getting tortured in a prison camp and pure consciousness would remain the same. It's the thoughts and feelings - the experience level that comes and goes - which attaches values. The person suffers the torture, pure consciousness does not.
That's not to say that thoughts and feelings don't matter. We're not making value judgments here. Remember, the goal is the truth of who you really are, and by extension, what all of reality is. They are one in of the same. It's not about stopping thoughts and feelings from happening - that is called spiritual bypassing - it's about embodying your human level experience in this present moment in the consciousness that is here and now. You could stub your toe and get angry and the anger will occur and then it's just gone because it's a temporary form. There is no clinging to the form.
There is a way to embody this human life in such a way that both the non-duality of god/oneness and the duality of the human individual are held in balance. The human level is not neglected or spiritually bypassed... they do not get dissolved into the "absolute" like when you hear spiritual automatons all sounding the same with, "I am not this body, I am not this mind, I am not this place, I am not this time." Yet you are seemingly you and not me. You are not a tree or a dog or a table. There are apparent forms. Yet all of those forms arise from the same consciousness. And at the same time, all forms are "lit up" by the same consciousness, the same non-duality. It's like cosmic puppetry, all the puppets are on the same hand, lit up by the same love, all interacting with each other, even fighting one another, and then the hand takes them off and says, kidding! But the joke is eternal love.
This is all very cerebral to talk about. The actual practice of it doesn't involve mind because mind can never get it. But on a "mind" level, it brings me peace because I know intellectually that I'm not the one doing this. Samsara goes on and on like a never ending ticker tape and it's all just God doing it. It's not enough to "know" this knowledge, because the knowing does not bring you peace. It is the meditation on the bliss that brings you the peace -- you have to practice it in every life situation. Satchitananda, Existence-Consciousness-Bliss, is readily accessible no matter where you are or what is apparently happening. You don't have to do anything. It's just there. The bliss from it is not a temporary state. It has natural qualities like peace, permanence, bliss, love, a feeling of home and surrender -- these are just words, but the qualities are reality.
Once you tap into that, the offerings of the Samsaric world pale in comparison. The "karma" of the person will continue to do what it does -- i.e. I am studying to go to med school, even though it's all just Samsara (a dream), and in this dream there's a person called Foreigner who wants to do it. But I'm aware it's all a cosmic dance of God doing itself. The real joy is in God, who is me-as-this-person, who is in everything and all forms. I can rejoice in who I am!
The tl;dr version: no matter what you do in life, good or bad, remember who you really are and keep asking yourself who you are until you reverse engineer the whole illusion down to the basement level reality. Then there will just be peace.
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