There are many things that I can doubt, but I cannot doubt my own consciousness in this moment.  My consciousness IS, and even if I tried to doubt it, it would be my consciousness doing the doubting.  I can imagine that my senses are being presented with a fake reality – say, a completely virtual or digital reality, which looks real but is merely a series of extremely realistic images.  But even then, I cannot doubt the consciousness that is doing the watching.

The very undeniability of my present awareness, the undeniability of my consciousness, immediately delivers to me a certainty of existence in this moment, a certainty of Being in the now-ness of this moment.  I cannot doubt consciousness and Being in this moment, for it is the ground of all knowing, all seeing, all existing…

So I can doubt the objects of my consciousness, but I can never believably doubt the doubter, never really doubt the Witness of the entire display.

Who am I? 

Anything I can see, touch, feel or think cannot be who I am.

Anything I can witness, anything I am aware of, is an object – it cannot be who I am

I am aware of my feelings, so I am not my feelings.

I am aware of my thoughts, so I am not my thoughts.

Clouds float by in the sky, thoughts float by in the mind, feelings float by in the body – and I am none of these because I am aware of them all.

I can doubt that clouds exist, I can doubt that feelings exist, I can doubt that objects of thought exist – but I cannot doubt that the Witness exists in this moment, because the Witness would still be there to witness the doubt.

I am not objects in nature, not feelings in the body, not thoughts in the mind, for I can Witness them all. Something in you is aware of all these things. 

So tell me:
What is it in you that is conscious of everything?

Let your mind relax. Let your mind relax and expand, mixing with the sky in front of it. Then notice: the clouds float by in the sky, and you are effortlessly aware of them. Feelings float by in the body, and you are effortlessly aware of them, too. Thoughts float by in the mind, and you are aware of them as well. Nature floats by, feelings float by, thoughts float by… and you are aware of all of them.

So tell me: Who are you?

You are not your thoughts, for you are aware of them. You are not your feelings, for you are aware of them. You are not any objects that you can see, for you are aware of them too. Something in you is aware of all these things.

So tell me: What is it in you that is conscious of everything? What is it in you that is always awake? Always fully present? Something in you right now is effortlessly noticing everything that arises. What is that? That vast infinite witnessing awareness, don’t you recognize it? What is that Witness?

You are that Witness, aren’t you? You are the pure Seer, pure awareness, the pure Spirit that impartially witnesses everything that arises, moment to moment. Your awareness is spacious, wide‑open, empty and clear, and yet it registers everything that arises.

That very Witness is Spirit within, looking out on a world that it created.
It sees but cannot be seen;  it hears but cannot be heard;  it knows but cannot be known.

It is Spirit itself that sees with your eyes, speaks with your lips, hears with your ears, reaches out with your arms. When will you confess this simple secret and awaken from the gruesome nightmare?

Can you see the words on this page?
Then 100% of Spirit is present, looking out through your eyes.

Can you feel the book in your hands?
Then 100% of Spirit is present, taking the world in its hands.

Can you hear the sound of that bird singing?
Then 100% of Spirit is present, listening to that song.

You cannot look for this Spirit, for it is doing the looking.
You cannot see this Spirit, for it is doing the seeing.
You cannot find this Spirit, for it does all the finding.

If you understand this, then Spirit is doing the understanding; if you don’t understand this, Spirit is doing that. Understand it or not, just that is Spirit.

Hence the amazing, secret, ultimate truth that slowly starts to dawn: the enlightened mind—pure Spirit itself—is not hard to attain but impossible to avoid. How could you ever be without that Spirit which is reading this sentence right now? Show me the Self you had before the Big Bang, and I will show you the Spirit of the entire Kosmos.

And as for that pure, timeless, formless Spirit: You… Are…  That   

Suppose you are sitting on a bench beside a path in high mountain country. There are grassy slopes all around, with rocks thrusting through them; on the opposite slope of the valley there is a stretch of scree with a low growth of alder bushes. Woods climb steeply on both sides of the valley, up to the line of treeless pasture; facing you, soaring up from the depths of the valley, is the mighty, glacier-tipped peak, its smooth snowfields and hard-edged rock faces touched at this moment with soft rose colour by the last rays of the departing sun, all marvelously sharp against the clear, pale, transparent blue of the sky.

According to our usual way of looking at it, everything that you are seeing has, apart from small changes, been there for thousands of years before you. After a while - not long - you will no longer exist, and the woods and rocks and sky will continue, unchanged, for thousands of years after you.

What is it that has called you so suddenly out of nothingness to enjoy for a brief while a spectacle which remains quite indifferent to you? The conditions for your existence are almost as old as the rocks. For thousands of years men have striven and suffered and begotten and women have brought forth in pain. A hundred years ago, perhaps, another man sat on this spot; like you, he gazed with awe and yearning in his heart at the dying light on the glaciers. Like you, he was begotten of man and born of woman. He felt pain and brief joy as you do. Was he someone else? Was it not you yourself? What is this Self of yours? What was the necessary condition for making the thing conceived this time into you, just you, and not someone else? What clearly intelligible scientific meaning can the "someone else" really have? If she who is now your mother had cohabited with someone else and had a son by him, and your father had done likewise, would you have come to be? Or were you living in them, and in your father's father, thousands of years ago? And even if this is so, why are you not your brother, why is you brother not you, why are you not one of your distant cousins? What justifies you in obstinately discovering this difference - the difference between you and someone else - when objectively what is there is the same?

Looking and thinking is that manner you may suddenly come to see, in a flash, the profound rightness of the basic conviction in Vedanta: it is not possible that this unity of knowledge, feeling, and choice which you call your own should have sprung into being from nothingness at a given moment not so long ago; rather this knowledge, feeling, and choice are essentially eternal and unchangeable and numerically one in all men, nay in all sensitive beings. But not in this sense - that you are a part, a piece, of an eternal, infinite being, an aspect or modification of it, as in Spinoza's pantheism. For we should then have the same baffling question: which part, which aspect are you? what, objectively, differentiates it from the others? No, but, inconceivable as it seems to ordinary reason, you - and all other conscious beings as such - are all in all. Hence this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is, in a certain sense, the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance. This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula which is yet really so simple and clear: Tat tvam asi, this is you. Or, again, in such words as "I am in the east and in the west, I am below and above, I am this whole world."

Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon Mother Earth, with the certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you. You are as firmly established, as invulnerable, as she - indeed, a thousand times firmer and more invulnerable. As surely as she will engulf you tomorrow, so surely will she bring you forth anew to new striving and suffering. And not merely, "some day": now, today, every day she is bringing you forth, not once, but thousands upon thousands of times, just as every day she engulfs you a thousand times over. For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.