The Ground of Being

Initially, you won’t be able to understand what the ground of being means — it is a perspective that lies beyond your current recognition. I cannot say it’s outside your awareness, as it isn’t — you are looking at it right now; you just cannot see it.

The ‘ground of being’ is best understood as the very source of both our inner, subjective experience and our ‘outer’ objective reality.

In samsaric existence, we experience two versions of reality:

• Our ‘inner world’ of thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and consciousness, and
• An ‘outer world’ of things we sense with our five senses.

Both these worlds coexist, yet they are quite different. Our consciousness seems stranded between them, confusing scientists and philosophers, who have either dismissed the inner world or described us as ‘ghosts in machines’.

But the answer to this riddle — why these two realities meet in the middle, and that middle somehow includes you — is that both are expressions of a single, deeper source. This deeper source is called the ground of being — and is what we now explore. It echoes the biblical and gnostic notion of the ‘all-good,’ omnipotent and omniscient source, which manifests allegorically in the four biblical rivers of Eden when recognised.

We all possess this ground of being; it is the instinctive awareness that notices our thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and reality. Yet, it remains invisible and unknowable — we only experience its expressions.

This ground divides into two — inner and outer — through the mind’s deeply ingrained habit of objectifying, which ordinarily lies beyond conscious control. Every waking moment, we notice ‘things’ — labels we assign to phenomena. Each time the mind creates a ‘thing’, it engages thoughts, perceptions, and consciousness, which entangle through papanca (proliferation). Every time we have a thought, we create a thinker; every time we experience a feeling, we create a feeler.

Thus, these two worlds arise through the ceaseless production of thought, perception, and feeling — habits deeply rooted in conditioned existence.

The ground of being is the original, undivided awareness prior to this fragmentation — before the mind chases thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. It remains ever-present, but through delusion, we become lost in objects and divide our experience.

Original purity is ever-present but obscured because the mind habitually extroverts itself through the senses and becomes entangled with conceptual illusions. Thoughts, feelings, and experiences are transient, yet we pollute them by chasing after and reliving past traumas without the ability to stop.

The difference between a fully enlightened arahant and others is that the arahant, through profound insight into reality, has abandoned mentally chasing after thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. They see things as they are, firmly grounded in the present.

The difference between a Buddha and all others is that a Buddha has entirely cut off this dualistic mechanism. There are no thoughts, feelings, or perceptions as we ordinarily experience them. These occur, but within a mind that unifies both ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ into a single, vast, empty awareness. Here, phenomena are ghostlike and insubstantial; the Buddha identifies with neither — even physical form is seen as transient and illusory.

For those familiar with the occult or Kabbalah: the ground of being corresponds to the first three sephirot. Our challenge is noticing what lies nearer than the mundane awareness represented by the lower sephirot, which are merely expressions of the first three essences.

Do not strive to ‘recognise’ the ground of being — striving prevents its appearance. It must be noticed subtly, casually, almost as if one forgets entirely to do anything at all.

“With the cessation of objectification, consciousness no longer lands anywhere. Freed, it drifts nowhere; it remains independent, unshaken, without attachments. That, monks, is the end of suffering.”
— Majjhima Nikāya 28, Mahātaṇhāsaṅkhaya Sutta