The same awareness perceives sadness and joy; one can return to that awareness to experience openness, tranquility, and freedom from contraction. Emotions can be observed from a vantage that is not limited to the emotion itself. This ability to shift into the condition of awareness is always available when sought. Each person's position in the universe illuminates experience uniquely, yet the substratum of experience—consciousness—is fundamentally the same across people. Memories, skills, and perceptions vary, but the lived experience remains profound. External phenomena are processes appearing within consciousness, which itself is already free of the problems experienced.
I mean, the amazing thing about our circumstances that each one of us is in a position that is in some sense, as free and as profound and as in touch with reality, as any other position in this universe, where you stand, the universe is illuminated as you, as your experience in this moment. And that we call this substratum of experience, consciousness, for lack of a better word.
It's possible to recognize that that in you, which is aware of sadness, is the same thing that's aware of joy. And you can drop back into that condition of awareness and recognize that it has this intrinsic quality of openness and tranquility and freedom from any sort of contraction, right?
And so you can be aware of sadness from a point of view that is not merely sad, and you can be aware of fear from a point of view that's not merely afraid. And the ability to drop back into that condition is always available really, if you simply remember to look for it.
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