Just as natural gas carries an added scent so that we can perceive what would otherwise be invisible, awareness too seems to acquire a kind of marker — a coloring that allows it to be noticed. We think we are sensing the essence, but we are really sensing the additive.
Imagine this essence of self — pure, transparent being — taking on a visible form, like the subtle smoke or ghostly energy shown in films. It swirls freely in one space, thick and luminous, then narrows into a thread as it slips beneath the crack of a door, only to widen and flow again on the other side. The movement is continuous; what changes is how it appears.
The same is true of awareness. On one side of perception, it seems condensed — personalized, tinted by body and mind. On the other, it is open, diffuse, without distinction. Yet the current moving through both is the same. The narrowing is not a loss of essence but a shift in expression, shaped by the form through which it moves.
What we usually perceive — the color, the vibration, the sense of “me” — is like the added scent or the glow of smoke: a perceptual aid that makes the invisible visible. Beneath that coloring flows the unchanging current of being, which neither begins nor ends at the boundaries of self.
Passing through the narrow portal of mind and body, awareness seems to separate into two realms — the inner and the outer, the embodied and the free. But this division is an illusion of the doorway itself. On either side, the same essence moves, joining and rejoining itself.
To see this clearly is to recognize that what we call individuality is the coloration of an undivided field. The awareness that flows through “me” is not different from the awareness that flows through everything. The only distinction is how it is tinted, shaped, and briefly held before returning again — uncolored, unbound — to its own source.
Spiritual Gravity 