The 'experience' of self realization.

I'm sometimes asked, via my website and email, about the experience of self realization.

It's not an experience in the usual sense of the word and is actually impossible to describe but can be likened to a visit to the cinema.

When we enter a cinema we sit down and look at the blank screen but don't really pay any attention to it. Soon coloured lights start moving about; the mind very quickly becomes enteretained and starts to make sense of what's happening on the screen and soon makes a story out of it. It's not long before we become involved in the apparent story and characters and soon identify with one of the character in the story and forget that we're actually in the cinema (neither character nor story is actually real).

Like-wise in life the awareness that we are soon became identified with one of the characters that regularly appeared in the story - what we call me.

We are not now, nor will we ever be that character and the story actually has no more substance than a cinema movie but as all the characters in the movie keep telling us that we are real we believe it.

What we are, and have always been, is pure awareness that the story of life appears in, or on. We are, if you like, the screen and like a cinema screen not very entertaining to the mind. After identification we forget who we really are but it doesn't alter the truth of our true nature.

Self realization is the sudden intuitive realization that we are actually the awareness that witnesses everything and not the witnessed; the observer, not the observed.

The story of life continues.
As they say before enlightnment chop wood & fetch water,
After enlightenment chop wood & fetch water.