Colin Drake - The Happiness That Needs Nothing: Pointers to That Which is Always Here

This contains vital information and instructions for the reader and should be read before accessing the rest of the book.

It also contains a brief resume of each chapter.

This book is written as a stand-alone guide to Awakening and is composed of articles written since the publication of Awareness of Awareness The Open Door . After each book I think that I have written my last, but since then the insights, questions, discussions and answers have continued - resulting in this book. As I have said before I have no control over this process for I do not choose to sit and write articles, they just emerge from my investigations and contemplations, or in response to questions and discussions. There are long periods when no writing takes place and then sometimes I can hardly stop!

The title indicates the direction that my investigations into Reality have taken over the last year. Thus, many of the chapters deal with the joy of life after awakening and the prologue The Happiness that Needs Nothing - sets the tone for what follows. There are also chapters which deal with other facets of Reality, but they all have one theme in common that of self-identity who, or what, are we in essence? What is it that is at the core of our being, deeper than the surface level of mind/body and thoughts/sensations?

The easiest way to find out is to investigate our moment to moment experience, which reveals that our deepest essence is A wareness itself, and the framework for this investigation is given in appendix one. At this stage we need to become clear as to the meaning of the term awareness which has two meanings which we must not confuse. The phrase awareness of Awareness utilises both of these meanings and for this reason I have used a capital letter for the second one so that they may be easily distinguished in what follows.

The first occurrence (awareness) is synonymous with mindfulness, that is seeing with the mind, or keeping (something) in the mind. It also means becoming conscious of, noticing, or perceiving, as in I became aware of This is the normal everyday usage as in the OED definition of aware having knowledge or perception of

So the term awareness of Awareness means becoming conscious, or having knowledge or perception, of Awareness. We now need to define this Awareness which is simply the total seeing and perceiving (or seer and perceiver) of everything detected by the mind and senses, whereas awareness (becoming aware of) is the partial seeing of those thoughts/sensations on which the mind is focussed, or which are noticed. So these are not different, awareness just being a limited version (or incidence) of Awareness.

This is easy to directly experience by closing ones eyes and seeing whether you can simultaneously be aware of (notice) all of the thoughts/mental images and sensations that are occurring. This is found to be impossible and yet these are all there in Awareness, which becomes apparent when one focuses ones mind on , or turns ones mind to, any of them. and there they are! About this I wrote the following in Beyond The Separate Self :

It is obvious that we would not know (be aware of) our own perceptions without Awareness being present. This does not mean that we are always conscious of each one of them, as this is dictated by where we put our attention, or upon what we focus our mind. However, all sensations detected by the body are there in Awareness, and we can readily become conscious of them by turning our attention to them. It is also true that our thoughts and mental images immediately appear in Awareness, but these require less attention to be seen as they occur in the mind itself. So Awareness is like the screen on which all of our thoughts and sensations appear, and the mind becomes conscious of these by focusing on them. Take, for example, what happens when you open your eyes and look at a beautiful view: everything seen immediately appears in Awareness, but for the mind to make anything of this it needs to focus upon certain elements of what is seen. There is an amazing tree, wow look at that eagle, what a stunning sky, etc. To be sure, you may just make a statement like what a beautiful view, but this does not in itself say much and is so self-evident as to be not worth saying!

The point is that the mind is a tool for problem-solving, information storing, retrieval and processing, and evaluating the data provided by our senses. It achieves this by focusing on specific sensations, thoughts or mental images that are present in Awareness, and processing these. In fact we only truly see things as they are when they are not seen through the filter of the mind, and this occurs when what is encountered is able to stop the mind. For instance we have all had glimpses of this at various times in our lives, often when seeing a beautiful sunset, a waterfall or some other wonderful natural phenomenon. These may seem other-worldly or intensely vivid, until the mind kicks in with any evaluation when everything seems to return to normal. In fact nature is much more vivid and alive when directly perceived, and the more we identify with the perceiver, as Awareness itself, the more frequently we see things as they are.

This Awareness is the constant conscious subjective presence in which our thoughts/mental images and sensations arise, abide, are spied and subside . Before every one of them Awareness is present, during each one of them they are seen by This and This is still here after they go. Just check this out now notice that before each thought/sensation there is Awareness of what is (the totality of these at any given moment) , during each of these there is Awareness of them within what is and after each of them has gone there is still Awareness of what is.