Ask a Three-Year-Old

It’s your ordinary, obvious awareness. This.

It’s not your ordinary awareness in some another dimension, or on a higher level that you have not reached. It’s not your ordinary awareness when you’re spiritually clear enough to see it. It’s THIS that you can’t miss right now, nor can anyone miss right now. The dullest dullard can’t miss it. Even crazy people can’t miss it.

Are you missing it? No, you’re not. You just think you’re looking for something fancier.

Imagine yourself to be a child of three. As that child, are you aware? You don’t know what to call it at three, and you don’t know what “aware” means, and you wouldn’t know what to make of a silly question like that. But you would know, without words for it, without attaching importance to it, that you were aware. Without any doubt at all.

Imagine yourself with an IQ of 85. You go about your daily business with very little ability to think things through. Are you aware? Without any analysis, without any sophistication, are you aware? As you go about your mundane affairs, as much as you can handle with low intelligence, are you aware?

Imagine yourself with mental illness, perhaps after a stroke, when part of your brain is not working, and your sense of “I” is unrecognizable; you may have seen a popular video recently that described this scenario exactly. In this situation, are you aware? As you look through your business cards and can’t figure out which one of them refers to you, are you aware?

So you can see that what is being pointed to is not dependent on cleverness, determination, or spiritual advancement. It is not dependent on getting the words, being smart enough to figure it out, or even having an intact sense of self. Think of the child again – it is so obvious to him that he is aware that he would never even consider asking about it!

Even if you lost your history completely, and all your memories of who you are were wiped out, would you be aware? Isn’t that essentially what every new moment is? Awareness, with no history, no memories. Just this moment, the first one, unborn, empty, spacious. This is who you are, at three, or when ignorant, or when crazy, or when no one at all. Just this present-time, ever-fresh consciousness. And there is no doubt about it!

We’ve been working at this enlightenment project for so long, and we’ve read so many books, and we’ve achieved a highly sophisticated level of spirituality, compared to the rest of the world. And perhaps this is part of the reluctance to see the simplicity of what is being pointed to. We have to swallow our spiritual pride and realize we’ve been duped. How embarrassing to realize that all of our unspiritual friends know they are aware!

All the spiritual advancements were interesting, in the story, and made us feel good – and even superior – but they had nothing to do with this simple awareness that is being pointed to. The pre-verbal child knows better than we do, with all our fancy experiences of total melding with oneness. We have to just let it be this simple, this obvious. The spiritual work we did may come in handy, but not here, not for what is being pointed to, your true nature.

So just drop the “spiritual” façade, drop the superiority, and just notice what is, with childlike innocence. It is this simple. It is shocking, and it is humbling.