What is your character? 

In other words, what is the representative of the infinite and absolute that you are?

What definable form is apparently shrinking and limiting the  indefinable being-ness of you?

The red plastic person-shape counter you used to choose for Ludo?  

The Rolls Royce car when you play Monopoly at Christmas?

Mrs Peacock in Clue/Cluedo? 

Michael, Trevor and Franklin of Grand Theft Auto? 

In this game of life, how is your character separated out from the others?

Colour?

Shape?

Job?

Football team?

Personality? 

Preferences? 

Role? 

Possessions? 

Knowledge?

Education?

Habits? 

Hobbies?

Problems?

Needs?

Lack?

Fear?

Failure? 

Whatever differentiates the ‘you’ player has to be very distinctive. The more distinctive the better.

So the character can say, ‘This is me. I know who I am. I am like this.’ 

It doesn’t matter if that distinction is:

‘I am the best thing since sliced bread. I should rule the world’ 

or 

‘I am a walking disaster. The world would be better off without me.’

Both serve the function of separating out the character from everything else. 

That’s a very important part of The Game. If the main character just got lost amongst all the other characters there would be No Game. 

The character does not decide its features, its distinctions. 

They just are. 

But, because the game always takes place from the perspective of the main character, these features, these needs, these problems, this identity, and above all this ‘self setting’ are what creates The Game.  

The character is vital. 

Think of any character in any video game.

Imagine that character believing there is something it can do to prevent the game being turned off.

Imagine it living in fear of that happening.

This is insecurity. We, the character, are trying to make ourselves secure.

‘This life is terrifying. I need a guarantee that I will be OK, that things will work out for me. I can’t bear any uncertainty. I worry about losing my health, my possessions, the people and things I rely on. I am frightened of making a bad decision or getting life wrong. How can I know what to do?

Such a roller-coaster of a game. The search for security by a character that can be switched off at any moment. The nature of the character is insecurity, because it is an illusion. Identified with the character we are fighting to make this character real, stable, secure. It never can be.

There is nothing to secure. Nothing to fix down. No health to hold onto.

And in the deep knowing of that, houses can still be locked up for the night, doctors appointments can still be made, a body will move away from danger.

A few years ago, I had completed an advanced yoga teacher training on Paradise Island in the Bahamas. After the closing ceremony I wandered onto the beach. I was bare-foot, wearing a white dress, my mala beads around my neck. I was healthy, tanned and toned from hundreds of hours of yoga. The sand was pale yellow and the sea and sky a brilliant blue. A breeze gently lifted my hair from my neck. I walked along with my feet in the water. I was completely alone on the beach, and it was utterly tranquil. I was deeply at peace, feeling at absolute one-ness with life, the elements, the teachings. I understood in the core of my being the perfection of it all.

Then, out of nowhere, there was a roaring sound. Startled from my non-dualistic contemplations, I looked up to see a jet-ski appear in the empty sea ridden by a man and a woman. I watched as the jet-ski came straight towards me almost as if it was going to plough into me. Then at the last minute it took a steep curve, creating a wave of water that arched high into the sky before descending and drenching me with perfect precision from head to foot. The man and the woman burst into laughter and waved as the jet ski disappeared into the distance, leaving just me, the sea and beach once again.

I stood there for quite a while, a bedraggled, soaking, salty mess.

Then I wiped the sand and seawater off my face with the hem of my dress as best I could and made my way back to the ashram.

We think we’ve got it. We think we are complete, that we are enlightened, that we know everything, that we are somehow above all human suffering. And the moment that thought appears, along comes something like those cheery, wavy drenchers to say,

‘Oh no you haven’t. Not even slightly.’

The jet ski might come in the form of a parking ticket, an illness, an assault, a row with a friend or spouse, redundancy, a divorce, an unruly child, unexpected bills, criticism, indifference, being ignored or excluded…

The resistance and resentment experienced will come from whatever in that moment the identity is most attached to.

This is the gift of our lives. This is the perfection of the design. It shows over and over again that the identity of separation can never be secured.

The Shift cannot ever be driven by ego.

The Shift cannot even take place by trying to get rid of the ego.

Because the Shift is the ending of the attempt to secure the idea of a separate me through seeking, resistance or control. And that includes any attempt to get rid of an ego that is supposedly in the way of the desired experience of peace, happiness or freedom.

The Shift is not an activity of separation.

It is separation falling away.

The Shift is not an activity of control.

It is all belief in an independent controlling entity dissolving.

The Shift is not an activity of resistance.

It is an opening to experience happening.

The Shift is not a denial of reality.

It is attention coming from such openness and curiosity that anything not true cannot remain.

The Shift is not even a change.

It is the disappearance of what wasn’t even there in the first place.

The Shift is a non-event. Simply the ending of an illusion. Simply truth realised.

The Shift.

One evening, I was on my own watching ‘Fleabag’, the series created by Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Fleabag is the main character (we never learn her real name).

Her sister in the programme is called Claire. Married to someone who treats her appallingly, Claire is in love with a Scandinavian man she has met through her work. He is called Klare.

Fleabag and her sister bump into this man in the park. (It’s the ‘I look like a pencil!’ haircut scene for those in the know.)

The scene ends with Fleabag firstly turning to her sister and saying “Bye Claire”.

Then she turns to the man and says, “Bye Klare…

…And then she turns to the camera (ie to ME the viewer!!!) and says “Bye Clare”.

Yikes! I almost jumped out of my skin. (My name is Clare remember. It might not have had the same effect if my name was anything else). For a split second I felt like I’d crossed a line between two dimensions, suspended between two planets, in two worlds simultaneously.

Because, as absolutely involving, moving and engaging as a piece of film is, the characters on screen exist in a different (unreal) plane to the viewer, the (real) conscious space in which they appear.

The format of the Fleabag programmed played on this. The main character would continually look to or speak to the camera, to us the viewer. At one level it seemed to cross the line between the two worlds but at a deeply known level it was known it never could.

The characters in the film and the viewer of the film do not exist in the same reality.

While the viewer is engaged in the film, however, it looks absolutely real. In those moments, the viewer is oblivious to the fact that it is just a creation.

The viewer is fully identified in to the movie, moved by the drama, engaged in the twists and turns of the relationships.

The viewer’s only actual reality, as witness, as the space in which all elements of the movie arise, is forgotten about.

And then something breaks the spell of identification with the movie.

It might get boring. It might be a bit of bad acting or clunky script. It might be the Starbucks cup in the Game of Thrones. It might be someone coming into the living room and asking if we want a cup of tea. It might be the closing music beginning and the end credits appearing.

(It probably won’t be one of the characters apparently turning to you and addressing you by name, I’m afraid. That is reserved only for Clares apparently.)

Without the viewer in the first place though, the programme could not have been experienced. It could not exist in the way it appears to.

Consciousness is the first ‘pointing’ of this book. Consciousness is the viewer. It is the illuminated present in which everything happens and of which everything is made. Without Consciousness there would be nothing, no-thing, nothing visible, nothing sensed, nothing felt, nothing seen or heard.

Consciousness is the prerequisite to anything appearing, in the way that a viewer is the prerequisite to the film being seen, to the film coming into existence.

The film is so vivid, so real, so gripping, so enthralling that the fact of the viewer is completely disregarded. The act of viewing is irrelevant (even though, in reality, it is the only truth). The film is grabbing all attention.

But what is the film? What is it made of? It is fascinating to consider that, while that film, that arc of tragedy and drama and adventure and tension and loss, appears so compellingly, objectively real, it is actually made of the viewer.

In a conversation about reality, what becomes clear is that the thing that looks so real, the film, does not exist as anything tangible or real. It is the viewing, that is making it all possible.

When the film, that drama, that tension starts to become less compelling, it starts to be recognised for what it is, a creation of Consciousness.

It becomes recognised that that is what we are. And that is mind-blowing. The mind begins to settle back into the truth that all these comings and goings are happening within awareness. Without Consciousness or awareness, nothing.

We can explore the idea of Consciousness a bit more deeply with the dream analogy. When we are asleep, we might dream of a ‘me’ character going through different experiences and endeavours. That entire set up is happening within the existence of the dreamer. The character in the dream, as real as it looks, as much like us as it appears, is just a creation of mind in that moment, made possible because there is a dreamer.

The dream is made possible by the dreamer and the dream is made of the dreamer: it is all the same thing. There is no possibility of separating dream and dreamer. There is not even any possibility of separating anything within the dream, as much as it appears that it is a real world, that there are real people and real events, it is still a creation of the dream.

Within the dream, it looks like survival can only be achieved through controlling the happenings within the dream and that safety is only possible by securing the character. But actually, because the whole thing is taking place within the dreamer’s sleeping mind, the only possible solution for that character is for the dreamer to wake up. In other words, the only way the character’s challenges can end is for the dream to end and the character to disappear. On waking, there is no character, no threat.

What we start to see from this, is that the Consciousness that we are enables an experience of a separate idea of what we are. But the truth is that we are only that space in which that lived experience of separation arises.

Through this section of HOME we are essentially considering this shift of lived experience:

From a human conscious mind identified in to the drama, believing its beliefs…

…To a human conscious mind that is no longer identified to the drama and is settling back into its truth as the viewer, the dreamer, the Consciousness space in which everything appears.

When we suffer, the mind is trying to find its way within the dream back to reality, to Wholeness but it can never achieve that. The dream depends on the belief that it is real, and that it is separate from the dreamer, separate from the Consciousness that we are.

Trying to find our way Home within the dream only maintains the dream further.

Isn’t that right, Claire?

Klare?

Clare…?