Just Be

Just Be

November 2022

Just Be

By Ajay Kalra

“I understand, but I am not living the  Knowledge.” 

“If I was Pure Awareness, I would not behave  in that manner.” 

“I have experienced Emptiness, but the feel ing of Emptiness does not last.” 

“I need to work on myself before I can still the  mind to become Awareness.” 

“Self-realisation is a deep mental inquiry into  ‘Who Am I.’ It is tiring. Is it even necessary?” 

These are some statements I have heard from  people interested in the pursuit of Awareness.  A thing that is not a thing. Indescribable and  unconceivable. Something beyond the concep tion of the mind. 

Yet the mind, being the mind, conceptualises  it. 

“If I realised Awareness, I would live like this,  behave like this. To realise Awareness I have to  do this, understand this, or be this. The feeling  of Awareness must be permanent, not tempo 

rary, for it to qualify as true realisation.” When  I hear such statements, I don’t know what to  say. Then I remember a time when my mind  would do the same thing. Generate fantasies  of Enlightenment. A state of purity. Free of  conflict. Unconditionally loving. Desireless.  Saintly.

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What causes the mind to conceptualise some thing that is beyond concepts?” Firstly, the na ture of the mind is to conceptualise. The mind  survives and thrives on abstraction. It creates a  symbolic reality using words and images. Even  if we have only heard of but never experienced a  place, person, or thing, the mind creates a men tal representation of it. The mind anticipates  how a thing will be, even if it has no first-hand  experience of it. 

Secondly, given the spiritual literature available  for consumption, the mind has enough fodder to  fuel its imagination of something that is beyond  imagination. Different religious and spiritual  leaders, along with a plethora of books, have described 

•  How one can attain transcendental reality •  What one must do for it 

•  What happens when one gets it 

•  How a realised person behaves 

The more one reads and hears, the more the  mind projects ideas of Self-realisation.  

Having exhausted my conceptualising karma, I  have realised a few things. 

We Are Life 

One cannot do anything to be aware. One is al ways aware. To be aware means to be alive. To  be alive means to be conscious. There is never a  time when one is not alive or conscious. None of us have experienced being born or being dead.  They are just concepts. All we have ever experi enced is being alive.  

Having said that, we do not honour life. We be lieve we are living a life. We feel we are in control  of life. We think we need to make our life. We do  not realise that we are life. This realisation is not  intellectual but a matter of experience. When we  pay attention to the expressions of life—breath ing, sensing, tasting, smelling, hearing, touch ing, seeing, thinking, and feeling—we become  life. 

Realisation Is Seeing 

Imagine you are walking on a dark road at night.  You see an object in front. Given its coiled shape,  you imagine it to be a snake. You stop in your  tracks. Slowly, you pull out a torch from your  bag and shine it on the object. In the brightness  of that light, you see that what you imagined  to be a snake is actually a rope. You smile and  peacefully carry on. 

Self-realisation is not a state of mind that is free  of thoughts. Or a mind that never experiences  anger, sadness, anxiety, disturbance, or confu sion. It is simply a ‘realisation’ that no person  is experiencing it. Sensing, perceiving, think ing, feeling, choosing, and doing happen in  Awareness. There is no perceiver, thinker, feeler,  chooser, or doer. 

Once one sees “I am not a person, all happens  in awareness” with sufficient clarity, one can not unsee it. Just like when one sees there is no  snake but just a rope, nothing can make you be lieve it is a snake. Because you have seen it clear ly. Seeing is all that was needed for Realisation. 

Being. Just Being. 

The eyes of the mind are concepts. The eyes of  awareness are Being.  

What does it mean to be?  

Existing. Living. Conscious. Present. Aware.  Breathing. Sensing. Different words referring  to the same thing. When we are aware of our  existence, we are in touch with something  tangible. When we are lost in unconscious  thoughts we are living in the abstract world of  concepts.  

Being has no goals and aspirations. It has no  past or future. It has no language. It has no  meaning. It plays no role. It simply is. Our  relative identities are the roles we play. Our  primary identity is Being. Because we are,  everything else is. If there was no life, there  would be no life situations. This is not an in 

tellectual puzzle to solve. When we honour Be ing, give it our attention, and acknowledge its  existence, it reveals that the entire Universe is  Being. Being is the gateway to Oneness. 

This Realisation does not come in the way of  living a normal life. We continue to do what we  do, using the language of I, me, and mine, all  the while realising that thought and language  have only a relative function.  

Unlike the conditioned mind, Being express es itself in ways that cannot be predicted. Be cause the playing field of Being is Presence.  Without the burden of the past or greed and  fear of the future. It is spontaneous, effortless,  and natural.  

Outer expressions of Being are not an indica tor of Realisation. Neither is the validation of  

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others. It requires no stamp of approval. It is  an unmistakable seeing into the nature of re ality. Realisation is self-evident; it is its own  proof. 

“The word is not the thing. The map is not  the territory. And the symbol is not the thing  symbolised.” says S I Hayakawa in his classic  book on semantics, Language in Thought and  Action. Conceptualising Awareness is like taking the reflection of the Moon in the water as  the Moon itself.  

The best use of concepts is to free ourself from  concepts. The finger pointing to the Sun is not  the Sun. Similarly, words pointing towards  Silence are not Silence. Yet, they play a vital  role. They help us cross the ocean of concepts  by shining the torch of Awareness on all concepts. When all the concepts of the mind are  seen as concepts, including the concept ‘I am a  person,’ then there is nothing more to see. The  false is seen as false.  

In that seeing, Nothing remains. 

Ajay Kalra is a teacher of Advaita Vedanta. He endeavours  to simplify the understanding,  practice and application of the  

Philosophy of Oneness through  his online classes, workshops,  writing and videos.