The Self-Luminous Crystal

‘I am listening’, ‘I am tired’ – always the same ‘I am’, temporarily qualified by activities or feelings. When you say ‘I am’, ask: to what experience does this refer? The body doesn’t assert ‘I am’, nor do thoughts or feelings. ‘I am’ expresses your primary experience before experiencing anything else. All other experience occurs in subject-object relationship; being is self-aware, like the sun illuminating itself just by being itself. Your being is like a crystal that seems coloured by nearby objects whilst remaining transparent. When mixed with thinking, your being appears agitated, but pure being itself contains no agitation. All innumerable experiences have temporarily coloured your being, but it has never been stained, hurt, aged or qualified. Like a screen unaffected by films, your being needs no purification or practice – it’s already luminous, free, at peace. This is recognition, not effort. Through sinking into being, experience becomes transparent to the light of your being.