Namaste. So now, if you’ve been following this series—which I hope you have, because you’ll need the background to understand these last couple of episodes—we’re going to talk about the stage beyond neither-perception-nor-non-perception, and the Buddha calls this themeless concentration:

“Further, Ānanda, the monk—not attending to the perception of the dimension of nothingness, not attending to the perception of the dimension of neither-perception-nor-non-perception—attends to the singleness based on the themeless concentration of awareness. His mind takes pleasure, finds satisfaction, settles, & indulges in its themeless concentration of awareness.”—Cūḷa Suññatā Sutta

This is beautiful, this is potent. This is the very, very next stage to full Enlightenment. Why? For the first time he says “concentration of awareness”. We’re not dealing anymore with concentration of consciousness, whether our consciousness is on earth or space or nothingness or emptiness or whatever. For the first time we’re dealing with pure awareness. This is a very significant thing. Why? Because consciousness always has an object. Consciousness is a stick with two ends.

Here’s the stick: on one end you have awareness; on the other end you have the object of awareness. So this is duality, because you have two ends: one is the cause, and one is the effect. But it doesn’t matter at this point, because the only thing that’s significant now is that the stick has two ends. And what do you find in the middle? ‘I’ [laughs], my self: “I am conscious of this.” And it doesn’t really matter whether it’s something with form, like a village or wilderness or earth, or something formless, like space, nothingness, emptiness, like that—it doesn’t matter. There is still the question of who is conscious of this? And that who, of course the answer is always ‘I’: “I am conscious.” [laughs] But we know that ‘I’ is something dependently arisen. In fact, consciousness is dependently arisen. It depends on what? Sankhārā, and sankhārā depend on ignorance—there’s a cute little bird outside my window, he’s only about this long. [laughs]

Anyway, consciousness depends on sankhārā, sankhārā depend on ignorance. But what does ignorance depend on? Awareness. Without awareness there is nothing else. The thing about awareness is, awareness is only aware of itself, it has no object. Or another way to say it is, that the object of awareness is awareness itself. So this is the perfect stage, this is Nibbāna itself. This is the aim, this is the goal, this is what we’ve been working toward step-by-step.