This talk is continuing our conversation about nonduality. One of the core dualities we are trained into is subject and object duality. The theme of this talk – recognising our essential self as awareness – and some of the experiential exercises are taken from a book called “Standing as Awareness” by the nondual philosopher Greg Goode.

Last month I spoke about the Koan of the goose in the bottle. This represents “normal” experience of duality – the goose in the bottle is a description of the self-centred dream – we are trapped, or identified as, a separate body-mind self that is the activity of suffering.

Practice can be described as shifting from our identification with the self-centered dream (the goose in the bottle) this limited body and mind which we take to be me, towards recognizing and establishing ourselves as being awareness itself. This is our journey from suffering in the self-centered dream to discovering our in freedom when we recognize ourselves as awareness (there never was a bottle in the first place) – is the journey to our home which we never left.