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How can I describe the way I experience this reality right now? Words fall short, but I’ll try to get close.

The past five years have been a journey of self-discovery—diving deep into emotional trauma, psychological healing, and an endless search for answers. But what was I really seeking? What am I seeking now? It’s this familiar essence that’s always been here: the core sense of “me” that hasn’t changed since my earliest memories. That continuous thread of being that runs through every moment of my life.

My awakening hasn’t been the dramatic flash I hoped for. There was no sudden flip where reality inverted and everything became crystal clear. Instead, it’s been a gradual unveiling of what was already here. I still catch myself wanting that big shift—that definitive moment where the small self dissolves into the capital-S Self. I want to let everything go, knowing intuitively that what I cling to isn’t fundamentally real. But here’s the paradox: isn’t the one who wants to let go the same as the one doing the holding on?

The only way I can claim any sort of “awakening” is by looking back at a past. The past which I now see doesn’t truly exist. How can I take yesterday as fact when it only appears in memory—and an unreliable memory at that? Where do I look for solid ground to prove my own existence? The truth is, there isn’t any. Everything I try to grasp dissolves as soon as it appears. I say my name: gone. I hear a bird chirp: gone. I feel hunger or boredom or excitement: all gone.

Some experiences seem more persistent than others, but when I look closely, even these are constantly evolving. What I call “hunger” is really a dance of shifting sensations—attention moving from stomach to head to hands to heart. The label “hunger” is just that: a label that appears and vanishes like everything else.

So what remains constant? If every thing exists in constant flux, what is left? The arising and passing away is the nature of reality, yet something persists. It’s that spark of recognition when I look in the mirror, the knowing that I am me when I wake up in the morning, and the knowing that I have always been me.

But thoughts are sticky. They demand attention, and in daily life, they seem endless. When I try to rest in pure sensation, thought pulls me back before I even notice. Yet I’ve discovered something crucial: awareness doesn’t require thinking. The sound of my keyboard comes pre-packaged with its own knowing. The mind doesn’t need to label “keyboard clacking” for the sound to be heard—it simply is. As Richard Lang says, “The sound is given in awareness.”

This principle extends everywhere. The sensation of feet on the floor, for instance, doesn’t disappear when I’m not actively noticing it. When attention returns there(here), I realize the feeling never left—it was always present, just out of focus.

Life isn’t actually a blur, though it sometimes seems that way. This moment, this now, is crystal clear. It’s the past and future—those thought-constructed realities—that are fuzzy and lifeless. What’s truly alive is here, now: this kaleidoscope of raw experience.

It is our human perspective that makes things appear constant—we see the same roads, and buildings, and signs on our daily commutes. We drive to the same offices and do the same tasks each day and go for walks through the same neighborhoods. But really, that’s an illusion of scale. Everything is in constant flux, moving, changing, becoming something new in every moment.

Breaking it down further, I can see that no two experiences are ever identical. The light that appears right now has never been this way before. The room I am in has never looked this exact way before. The sounds that appear here have never arrived this way before, and they will never be this way again. Reality is flowering and unfolding on itself endlessly, instantly, and eternally.

Reality is naturally psychedelic. We only think it’s ordinary because we’ve labeled everything and convinced ourselves we understand it all. But when we look closely, when we drop all of our assumptions, the extraordinary nature of simple existence reveals itself.