What's The Matter?

The view clouding your awakening.

What matters?

Is it the weather? The money in your account? The politics you argue about, the shape you're in, how many friends show up when you call?

Is it how spiritual you appear to be, how many books you've read, how many retreats you've attended? Is it how much you serve humanity, or whether you serve at all?

We spend most of a lifetime answering that question with the wrong list. Not because the list is evil, health matters, relationships matter, service matters, but because none of it is the thing that actually matters. It's all just the furniture in the room, but it is not the room.

And you already know this, somewhere underneath your striving. You've measured yourself against all of it, the health, the wealth, the friend count, the spiritual resume, and if you are honest you have never once been enough. Not because you fell short, but because you were measuring the wrong thing entirely.

What Actually Matters

There are things that matter. And underneath all of them is one that really matters: becoming the witness to your own existence.

Whether you realize it or not, you've already touched on this within your life. It is the moment you caught yourself mid-reaction, watching your own anger rise instead of just being angry. Or noticing your fear instead of just running from it.

That flicker of pause, distance, was you becoming the witness. Most people feel it for a second and let it go. What matters is staying there long enough to recognize it.

Once you're the witness of your existence, the next layer opens: How you view what you experience. This is what matters, not the experience itself. Once you realize that how you witness is the only thing that can ever change the experience, you stop chasing the illusion that free will lives inside the experience itself. It doesn't.

Your free will lives in how you see it.

So Who, Or What, Is Witnessing?

This is where it gets interesting. Is it “awareness” that is witnessing? Or is it love embodied that is witnessing?

They sound like the same thing. They aren't.

Awareness is not love. It isn't, not on its own. But the thing that has awareness is love. That distinction is easy to miss. Sit with this for a minute: you can become fully aware, watch your entire life unfold in real time, and still never recognize what you are or why you exist at all.

Some will say, "I exist to be aware." Fine. That's going to make for an interesting life review. You were aware of everything happening in your existence, and you did not choose love during it? Spicy! See you back here soon.

Love Matters

Your free will choice to recognize that you are love embodied is what matters.

Being sick doesn't matter. Being healed doesn't matter. Wealthy or poor, young or old, popular or alone, spiritually advanced or just beginning, none of it moves the needle.

The weather, the money, the politics, the friend count, the resume of your own awakening, all of it was never the point. The only thing that matters is the choice to recognize that you are love, manifested in the world, right now, in this body, in this life.

Baby Steps

Step 1 — Become the witness. Stop being fused to the experience. Step back far enough to see it happening. You've done this before, you just didn't stay in it long enough to create the pause.

Step 2 — Witness how you witness. This is the step people skip. Picture the moment: someone cuts you off, disappoints you, hurts you. You catch yourself watching it happen, great, that's Step 1.

Now look closer. Is there warmth in that watching, a kind of tenderness even toward your own reaction? That's witnessing from love embodied. Or is there just a flat, clinical distance, noted, filed, unmoved? That's the blank stare. Same witness. But a completely different world.

One of those is awakening. The other is just watching. Free will is found in the choice to be love.

The Trust That Makes It Possible

None of this works by force. You cannot grit your teeth into becoming the witness, and you certainly cannot grit your teeth into loving what you witness. The thing gritting teeth cannot witness at all. It is the fabricated self, the identity you built to survive the world, not the one that came here to love it. 

Becoming the witness from the state of love is something that is trusted, surrendered into being.

And that's the last step. The miracle happens in the trust.