Follow along on Mindfulness+, season 4, episode 9: Schroedinger’s Glacier.
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Irwin Schroedinger, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist of quantum mechanics, writes:
“The conditions for your existence are almost as old as the rocks. For thousands of years men have striven and suffered and begotten and women have brought forth in pain. A hundred years ago, perhaps, another man sat on this spot. Like you, he gazed with awe and yearning in his heart at the dying light of the glaciers. Like you, he was begotten of man and born of woman. He felt pain and brief joy as you do. Was he someone else? Was it not you yourself?”
What is this mystery that we hear from the mystics, sages, enlightened masters across the ages? This mystery that somehow all of it — all of manifestation, all of fullness, all of creation — is ourself. Of course, I’m not asking you to go looking in the mind for some new insight into this mystery, but rather we take the timeless path of the mystics through the ages and just bring our highest awareness to this moment, exactly this experience.
Notice in this spot where you find yourself in the world right now, everything you are seeing, everything you’re hearing, everything you’re feeling, the fullness of your experience in this moment. But rather than becoming fixated on what you’re seeing, what you’re hearing, what you’re feeling, you are invited to fall back. Get curious in this moment about what is seeing, what is hearing, what is feeling? What is it that sees through these eyes, hears through these ears, feels and senses through this body?
This is a question that can’t be answered with the mind; any constructs the mind conjures will just be more images to see and sounds to hear and feelings to feel. No words can describe this territory adequately, but it doesn’t mean we can’t point to it. What is it in this very moment that is seeing, that is hearing, that is feeling? Whatever it is, whatever we call it, we know that one of its properties is awareness. We know that it — which is to say we — are aware. If we weren’t aware, there’d be no seeing, no hearing, no feeling. There’d be no experience, no knowledge of any existence whatsoever.
And so we come to rest in this simple awareness, this openness, this luminosity. Whatever this awareness is, this aware presence, this consciousness, this intelligence, in this very moment we are aware of seeing and hearing and feeling.
Now this same awareness — this awareness that we are — the same awareness that is aware in this very moment of all arising must have been the same awareness that was aware the moment we were born, the moment we came into this world. The moment we entered this world in human form there was seeing, there was hearing, there was feeling and an awareness knowing this seeing, hearing and feeling.
A hundred years ago perhaps another human being sat in this very spot, stood in this very place that we are in this very moment. In that particular moment, that particular human being was aware of seeing and hearing and feeling, perhaps feeling things not so different from what we feel now. And a hundred years ago in the experience of this so-called other being, what was it that was aware of that feeling, of that hearing, of that seeing? In Schroedinger’s words, “Like you, he gazed with awe and yearning in his heart, the dying light of the glaciers, begotten of man, born of woman, he”/she/they all “felt pain and brief joy” as you do. What is it, what is this mystery that is aware of pain and brief joy?
Can you find a beginning to this awareness, this conscious spirit? Can you find a time where you, aware presence, didn’t exist? In order to find this time, this space where you didn’t exist, you, aware presence, would actually have to be present to be aware of that time and space.
Or what if you gaze into the eternal future, is there a time or place where you will cease to exist as aware presence? Where you awareness, intelligence and spirit will no longer be sensitive, no longer be sentient and aware? To find such a moment in time and space, you, aware presence, would have to be present and aware of this moment where you supposedly cease to exist. In this very moment, are you able in your direct experience as awareness to find any boundary, any border beyond which you simply stop? Are there any boundaries at all in your direct experience?
As we move deeper into this mystery, we start to intuit, we start to sense directly the same light, the same awareness that knows our own soul. It’s the same awareness that knows the world’s soul, that knows the soul of all worlds, all universes, all manifestation: all known through awareness, by awareness, as awareness.
Your closest friend and confidant who sees you personally, knows you, what is the mystery that knows through their heart and sees you and feels you and attunes to you, the same awareness through which you are aware of this dear friend, it’s the same awareness that knows and loves you back.
What about your enemy? The person you just can’t find a way to reconcile with, can’t find understanding in your heart of how they could be this way, what is it that is aware of the experience of not understanding our enemy? And is it not the same awareness that sees through their eyes, hears through their ears and feels through their heart? Is it not a seamless principle that enlivens us both, animates us both, the same awareness that knows pain and brief joy through both of us?
Right here, right now in this newly arising moment, this new spot in time where you stand, where you sit, where you lie, where you move, a tumbling kaleidoscope of sensory experience, seeing, hearing, feeling, touching, tasting, smelling. And what is it that knows this experience? What is it that’s aware? Whatever we call it, its boundaries are unfindable.
Feel this unity, this union in your heart and by heart I mean your very core, your very center. Rest in yourself, aware presence, neither coming nor going — the very light that lights up all worlds, all possible worlds.