Consciousness, the Light Behind All Objects – Jean Klein

Let your mind be very clear that when you are looking for your real self, it is it which is looking for itself. That is why you can never find it – because it is the ultimate looker which looks for itself. In other words, you are fundamentally already what you are. Any movement you undertake is a going away from it. You sit on this chair and you cannot find yourself on the chair by going somewhere else. So the inevitable question is, “How can I become aware of what I am?” But we cannot be aware of the “I am.” We can only be aware of things. All that we are aware of is an object, but what we already are, our real nature, is not an object. It is consciousness, the light behind all objects. It is the ultimate perceiver in which the perceived appears and disappears. It is its own perceiving. So it can never be understood in terms of subject-object relationship. The perceiver can never be perceived, as the eye cannot see its seeing.

All that is perceived, you are not. When you understand this, you are no longer concerned with what you are not, and there is a natural giving up of what you are not. All the energy that was eccentric, spent in achieving, becoming, grasping and so on, comes to a stop. And there is only stillness, silence, which is the original perception of the real self. It is your globality. In this globality, there is not a knower of the globality; otherwise, it could not be globality. We can only say, as in all the sacred sayings, it knows itself by itself.

Jean Klein

from Open to the Unknown – Third Millennium Publications, 1992

You can read more from Jean Klein here.