All the things I encounter in life are experiences I have. All my experiences always occur within my consciousness. Events in the world occur outside of me, but my experiences of those events occur inside of me. There are some events that I can control outside of me, and there are many that I cannot. However, I can control my experiences that occur inside of me. This is because the essence of experience is storytelling created by the experiencing self. In this lecture, we will examine consciousness, self, dreams, and experiences from this perspective. As Rupert Spira said, I hope that in life, which is a continuation of hardship and suffering, there is always a ray of light within me that leads us to peace. ------- References (Rupert Spira, The Transparency of Things, Fundamentals) The apparent continuity of an object is in fact the continuity of consciousness. What continues and continues in the flow of experience is 'knowingness' or experiencing, and appearance is merely a modulation of this knowing. Appearance has no substance or continuity in itself. Knowing exists before, during, and after any experience occurs. While any appearance is present, knowing takes the form of appearance. When there is no appearance, knowing is always present. As appearances, all objects are finite. For example, body/mind is finite as appearances. But in reality, the substance of this appearance is consciousness itself, and therefore has no limitations. From the perspective of ignorance, consciousness appears to have the characteristics of body/mind. That is, consciousness appears to be individual and finite. From the perspective of understanding, our real body and real mind are not individual, but endless consciousness itself. Experience always occurs in the present moment. Therefore, if we want to explore the nature of reality, this present experience is all we have. In this present experience, we have all the information we need to understand ourselves and the nature of reality. Because both we and reality exist, no matter what we are or what reality is. It is only necessary to follow our actual experience very closely and not rely on past concepts or ideas of what we think things are like. We must approach this exploration of experience very cleanly, allowing only what we know to be true. At this moment, something is being experienced. We may not know what that something is. It may be a dream, an illusion, for example. But we know that there is something. There is something known: the body, the mind, the world. And there is something we call 'me'. It experiences or knows what is known. These two apparent things, the experienced and the experiencer, the known and the knower, the perceived and the perceiver, are in fact always one complete whole. In our actual experience, they are not two things. But we tend to focus primarily, if not entirely, on the objective aspect of this complete whole. Most of the time, our attention is focused on thoughts and images, feelings and sensations, and perceptions: the mind, the body, the world. In this contemplation, on the other hand, we focus on the subjective aspect of experience rather than on the objective aspect. We pay attention to the perceiver rather than to the perceived. Experience is always a complete whole, but we artificially separate the perceiver and the perceived, the experiencer and the experienced, the subjective and objective aspects of experience. The purpose of this is to pay attention to the subjective aspect, that is, the presence of consciousness that witnesses the knower, the perceiver, the experiencer, and what is being experienced at each moment. Usually we are so absorbed in the objective aspect of experience that we overlook the presence of consciousness within and behind all experience. Consciousness, or what we call 'I', is what perceives or experiences. It is what witnesses the mind, the body, the world. It is what we see and understand in this moment. At this moment, consciousness is experiencing something, whether it is the mind, the body, or the world, and it is being perceived or experienced by consciousness, by what we call 'I'. In meditation, we pay attention to this witnessing consciousness. This means that we remain knowing as witnessing consciousness. That is, this consciousness remains knowing within itself as itself. We let the mind, the body, the world appear, remain, and disappear in the presence of this consciousness. Since mind, body, and world are somehow doing something, we simply cooperate with such cases already all the time. In this state, we know that our self, that is, consciousness, is something that cannot be conceived or perceived, but we know what we are. So we mistakenly identify 'I', that is, consciousness, with body/mind, and as a result, we know our self as something, but now we understand our self as a witness, as something that is not objective. Consciousness, 'I', the subject,