When I was a child there was only this reality : the one I was seeing. Then it appeared as though I might not in fact be a truth detecting machine, that I was actually a fool creating mischief.
Armed with this superior knowledge, I advance in the hope that I may gain the necessary insight to see whats what once again.
Woe is me.
Not in the closed system that the conditioned brain is. Nevertheless, the brain can try to be open in spite of its conditioning, thereby taking the measure of its resistance to choiceless awareness and its reactive response.
That is how I understand it as well. Something extraordinary.
To what end? What do we do with this data?
The consummate seeking of gratification is our common lot. If we were capable of simple awareness - which by definition is wholistic and therefore has no concept of value, worth, betterment, etc - then you would think what actually is the case would be revealed to thought. And “what actually is” for any given individual is the incessant movement of thought as ideation. What thought does with that revelation - that it ascribes greater value to ideas than to reality, to the point of conflating them - is of no concern to awareness. Awareness is an activity not a personified, entity-associated process like thought. Awareness can only reveal, it cannot and does not react. Awareness, being whole, and therefore beyond good and evil, can have no agenda. It is not alive in the sense that we are, us here and the rest of life there, it is life itself.
It is folly to assume we can easily “grasp” awareness. There is nothing harder to do than to do nothing. Seems to me it would be akin to coming face to face with the sacred. The miracle of life in whatever form it manifests as in the current moment, which does not preclude the movement of thought and its illusory, ideational content.
Self-knowledge. It’s not enough to say or believe I’m resisting what awareness reveals in favor of what I want/don’t want, believe/don’t believe, etc. - I must feel the resistance/reaction directly.