Discovering Aliveness

While all words ultimately fail to capture reality’s unfathomable nature, aliveness is a word that evokes something of the vibrancy, potency, and dynamism of everything. This that’s here is alive, isn't it? It's absolutely vital, pulsing with aliveness. It’s palpable, just how alive everything is.

We encounter this incredible range of phenomena, the myriad textures of sound, light, thought, emotion, and sensation, so different, one from the next. And then, there are all the flavors and textures of life that don't really fit into any clear conceptual or linguistic category. But at the basis of all this diversity is aliveness, the vitality of everything that appears.

If you feel very relaxed and at ease, that’s the particular flavor of the aliveness in that moment; if you feel jittery and unsettled, then that's the flavor of the aliveness. It’s all the dance of this aliveness, no matter its presentation. It's impossible for the moment to ever become something other than aliveness. No matter the shape reality may take, it remains this vibrant aliveness. Let yourself really drink that in, the shocking aliveness of everything.

This aliveness is not merely something we can notice; we are the aliveness, inseparable from it. We are made of aliveness. Feel the body, how alive it is. It’s pulsating, isn’t it? And what we call the mind? The movement of thought, of emotion? It, too, is the dance of this primal aliveness.

And this that perceives the body, the mind, the personality? Whatever we might call that (consciousness, awareness), it is made of pure aliveness. Everything that appears is brimming with this aliveness, the electricity of life.

We may imagine that the aliveness can be noticed and then lost. But actually, it’s impossible to ever be cast out of the aliveness. The aliveness can never leave, never escape or depart from itself. There's just aliveness in all the myriad forms and shapes it can assume. We might prefer if certain versions of the aliveness were not happening while others we absolutely love and want to have more of. But they are all different versions of aliveness, different presentations of life.

Feel the way everything—all that’s being perceived and whatever it is that’s perceiving—is the aliveness. Aliveness feeling itself, aliveness noticing itself, appreciating itself, recognizing itself, drinking itself. Pure aliveness, everywhere. Feel the dynamism of this aliveness. It's not static but has this unmistakable quality of movement to it.

The aliveness is undivided. It's not split up into multiple alivenesses. Spatially speaking, it’s not divided into a here and a there. In that sense, the aliveness is utterly beyond space, everywhere and nowhere simultaneously.

The aliveness doesn’t exist in what was or what might be but only ever in what’s appearing in the instant. It can never escape the immediacy and arrive in some time other than now. It's always, always now.

Notice how the aliveness is also not determined by the way it’s presenting because no matter its flavor or quality and our subsequent interpretations of that, it remains the aliveness. Unconditioned. The aliveness has no causes or conditions; it is its own cause and condition! There’s no special place to go to find it, no special state to get ourselves into to find the aliveness. That's the beauty of it, that it’s just what is here right now, before we even take one step to realize it.

It may feel as if it’s more present when attention is brought to it. But aliveness is what’s present, even when it's not being focused on. That’s the trick, to see that whether it’s being looked at and appreciated or not, it’s the only thing that exists!

It’s impossible to be cast out of this totality of aliveness, impossible to be separated out or split off from the aliveness. The aliveness is undivided, without border or boundary. It's not made up of pieces, even as it shows up as all these seemingly differentiated parts and pieces.

The aliveness is already accomplished, already the case, already here as this very moment of experiencing… and the next… and the next…