Awareness the key to Enlightenment

Awareness is probably the most powerful tool that you have to progress in your quest for understanding. Awareness is primarily the tool of the unconscious and the universe, and the ego can also use this tool. Simply put, awareness is just being aware, that’s all. Too often we bypass awareness and presume, criticize, judge and apply meaning and when we do this, we create an artificial reality, an illusion. In fact most of our lives are illusions. Awareness is staying still in the moment and when we become aware of something. Stop and stay there. Stay in awareness. Don't move on, no need to be in a rush! The ego is so preoccupied with doing and keeping busy that it rarely does nothing. For it feels if it does nothing, it will be nothing. It wants to feel important, it wants to prove itself. Always searching for meaning. If you want meaning be still, be aware and no more, luxuriate in awareness for it is the starting point for all.

Awareness automatically leads to acceptance and acceptance is simply just accepting what is, without criticizing, judgment or meaning and without adding anything. Just simply accepting what you are aware of ‘just is’. Accepting automatically leads to love, not in the way we commonly use the term which includes the elements of possession, attachment, pride, desire and is a powerful emotion that flitters and is altered, if it is not reciprocated and it can quickly turn to hate. Love is unconditional; it is the experience of oneness. It has no boundaries and no limitations. It is the experience that follows awareness and the acceptance, love is the knowing, the experience and the appreciation of the sameness, the oneness. Love is the lack of separation.

If you sit still and look at a tree and allow yourself to be aware of the tree, without any objectives, just allowing the tree to be. You will become aware of the tree minus your conceptions, labels, meanings or thoughts about trees. If you allow yourself to remain in this awareness, there will come a point when you accept what is, accepting what you are witnessing, just is what it is. After this occurs you will feel love, for that is what the tree and you are, love is the universe. More correctly, you become aware of love, which is that you and the tree are one, that there is a oneness underlying everything. Both are living energy.
There is a glimmer of this love when you are alone in nature and admire the beauty or the serenity of the scenery, when there is nothing else to do except experience this moment.

Being aware is not an active looking or searching for something but a passive allowing of information to come from the object you are looking at to you! The information is already there, it is alive and flows. Allow it to flow through you, remove the blocks and obstacles that you have erected.
Philip Martin