The Importance Of Recognising Blind Alleys

In life, we have to go up and down some blind alleys until we realise the truth.

This important process exhausts our library of misinformation; we have to eliminate the mental cobwebs to see what isn’t true, before we can see clearly what is.

Navigating those blind alleys and sifting through our collection of delightfully daft inventories dismantles what we think we know.

True clarity isn’t about having all the answers right away. It’s being willing to ask the ridiculous questions, which strips away our unverified assumptions.

Proof is in the practice.

When we believe, we close the door to further investigation, and stop looking because we assume we’ve already arrived. We refuse to update the map, even when the landscape changes right in front of us.

The trickiest blind alley on this path is turning awareness itself into a new belief system. The moment we start intellectualising awareness, building a philosophy around it or treating it as a badge of enlightenment, we have left the reality of being aware and gone right back into the world of concepts.

Awareness isn’t something we need to believe in; it is what we are right now, reading these words. It’s immediate and experiential, and requires zero faith.

Awareness is the only constant because it is the space in which everything else appears, shifts and dissolves.

While beliefs, thoughts, emotions and physical sensations are constantly changing, the capacity to be aware of them remains completely unmoved. We can change our beliefs a hundred times in a lifetime, but the consciousness that observes those changes stays exactly the same.

This describes the difference between the contents of consciousness and consciousness itself.