The First and Last Knowledge

Just as you suddenly become aware of the space in this room when mentioned, though you’re experiencing it all along, you overlook being in favour of more colourful content. Like space and breath, being is so empty, transparent and silent that you ignore it, yet it is your most intimate experience. All great spiritual traditions originate from this single awareness. Before knowing anything about yourself, you know that you are. This knowing of being is your primary experience, untouched by human experience – what Zen calls ‘what you are before you were born’. It is also your last experience when all faculties have left you. Your being touches all experience intimately, but no experience touches it. Being seems to mix with experience content, creating the temporary finite self. Our life’s journey seeks to divest these limitations and stand again as unconditioned being – arriving where we started, knowing the place as if for the first time.