The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware - Henry Miller
It’s all about awareness.
In awareness, in awake-ness, there is aliveness. We spend living our lives in a tiny part of the universe - largely in the space between our ears - and even there in that small tunnel of perspective we’re not really aware or awake to what we are telling ourselves, to how we construct our life.
We have taken on beliefs, judgements, customs, ways and means and they have become Truths: The Way Things Are Done and The Way I Am and The Way You Should Be. These patterns of thought and these habits of doing are not Truth, not even close.
It’s not natural that we do these things, it’s just an agreed way of seeing and being in the world - sometimes as individuals, sometimes as societies. Some of these things serve us, many do not.
Unconscious rigidity in these ways doesn’t serve. It leaves one humourless, serious, static, unyielding and unbending. When life changes - and it does because life is change - it will inevitably meet up against the combined total of our assumed truths, that being that This Should Not Be Happening To Me. People’s unaware rigid expectations means they suffer, simply because they are sleep walking through life.
Awareness gives you the flexibility to make free choice. If you can be aware of what you are telling yourself, of the patterns of how you construct your life, then you can choose differently. Life doesn’t become an inevitable reaction, you don’t keep recreating the same situations time in, time out, you don’t keep giving energy to the same useless circle of thoughts: Awareness means life becomes Life.
It takes zero effort to be aware. Awareness just is. Open, watching, receptive. Awareness isn’t about stopping thought, that’s where the effort comes in. It just is seeing, attentive to all things, avoiding nothing. You can’t make your life aware. You can only be aware now. It matters not a doddle how awake you have been, only in this moment can you see clearly.
The beauty of awareness is opening your perception beyond the narrow tunnel of thought. There you discover much more about yourself and the world. Awareness has so little to do with thought and patterns of behaviour - awareness allows you to discover the still silent presence within. There you can discover unchanging permanent Truth. There you can live through anything with peace in your heart. There is absolute aliveness, it is the source of Life itself.