The sensitive seeker.

For most people life is exactly as it should be. In fact it's true for all of us. But for some of us who come to call ourselves seekers we have this intuitive feeling that something is wrong - or at least not quite right. It's an itch that we have difficulty scratching and it just doesn't go away. It's common for this feeling to exist for twenty odd years.

For me the final stages only came with the introduction of Advaita - or non-duality. Advaita is a wonderful system of pointers that led me to discover my true nature, a nature that was always true, but in the process of growing up I simply overlooked it and became identified as a person and used my mind to find the solution to problems. After all, the mind is designed exactly for that purpose - it makes sence out of chaos, and does it's best to solve problems. However the mind, being an object, can never understand the subjective space it occupies - the cognizing emptiness as 'Sailor' Bob calls it. The problem is that as people we use the mind exclusively. The solution is to once more become aware of, or to understand that there is a space that the mind occupies. The mind continues, it does it's job, but once it is known that we are not people with minds and evolved enough to become aware, but in fact that awareness is primary and everything else appears in it. Without awareness nothing is known. Thoughts are not detectable without awareness. So awareness is primary and everything else is secondry, objects appearing in awareness.

Once it dawns on us intuitively that in fact we are awareness then it is clearly seen that all thoughts and feelings appear and disappear on a regular basis but there is no-one to do anything about it. There is no-one in existence. The only thing that does not appear in awareness is a 'me'.
Prior to the realization we have been identified as a human. The 'me', that idea of a me came about as the result of the nature of the mind to identify patterns of energy and create order out of chaos. So what has always happened is that primarily there is awareness and thoughts, feelings, beliefs, this body, the world and the mind appear in random order. The mind observes this random order and makes sence of it.

If, as a child, the mind observes other people speaking directly to it and repeating a name it doesn't take long to say ah ha!, here I am and this is my name. This gets added to the original concept of seperation and the belief in an individual builds up. Without that mind life would be quite chaotic, so the mind continues to work - cutting wood and carrying water, but with realization we no longer live exclusively as the false identity. We know absolutely that what we are is the awareness that wittnesses everything.

With the new realization the seeking and the anquish of the seeker ends because we have once more found what we truely are, what we were looking for, what was never lost. Now it can be said that there is nothing wrong anymore.