Awareness is our natural state. Awareness means that we lead our lives fundamentally happy in compassion, peace and vibrant relationship, acting, thinking and feeling wisely, centered, authentically and joyfully.

When we fall out of awareness we become angry or fearful or sad about ourselves and our lives. We forget what it means to be aware and how that experience of life feels.

This natural state of awareness refers us to the bigger picture, the more expansive questions about existence that we human beings wonder about. What is life? What particularly is a human life? How should we live? What is death? The condition of wonderment that gives rise to these questions is itself a blessing. To live our lives in wonder is simple and profound. It is both a royal road to living in the Mystery and the acknowledgment that life is never knowable.

The Unknown is crucial in spirituality. To live humbly and simply without assumptions or expectations is the spiritual key to happiness. When we can truly do this (and all you have to do is stop doing what you are doing now to inhibit this!) blessings and treasures shower upon us, our lives and our relationship in gifts of love.

The Divine, by whatever name you address IT/Her/Him or them, is unquantifiable, unknown, immeasurable, unreasoned and impenetrable in the same way as you cannot become aware of or objectify yourself. You are the subject of your eternal life and you may refine you awareness, but you will never step outside it, neither would you want to. Your eyes of awareness are themselves the eyes of the world, at all times, in all places and circumstances. As the events of your life, through good and bad fortunes, dramas and vicissitudes unfold, you stand in the middle of all of it immersed in love and happiness, because deep down inside in your true nature you are whole. All of it is you, death and rebirth, good and evil, day and night in its many modifications and adaptations, beckoning you, even while you resist, to identify with it—with all of it or any of it.

But you are a human being who is ultimately Divine. So, unswayed by outer events, deeply accepting of all the faces of God and of all the minutiae of life in its unfathomable Mystery, you simply are.

BLOG entry #138

This article by Richard Harvey was originally published at http://www.therapyandspirituality.com/articles/  and it is part of an ongoing retrospective series of blogs. ‘Awareness is Our Natural State’ was first published in 2012.