As with the previous insight, this one follows pretty quickly from what we’ve already found: If everything arises within consciousness, and everything that arises within consciousness is consciousness, then everything is consciousness.

This insight isn’t meant to reduce everything to a single color of gray, any more than the insight that music is made of vibrations in the air renders a Beethoven symphony, somehow, not so much.

Nor do I want you to consume this insight quickly in order to dispense with it.

We’ve taken a journey together, teasing out all sorts of observations and checking them as well as possible with whatever your felt version of existence currently is. I’ve encouraged you to do this fairly and in your own time, without pulling any punches. And I’ve fully acknowledged that most if not all of what I’ve been saying doesn’t come with my copyright on it, but rather has been observed, written about, and acted upon by numerous remarkably wise and intelligent people again and again over the last few thousand years.

And now, we’ve landed on a conclusion that, despite all this prologue, you may well think is easily dispensable: Everything’s consciousness – it’s all one – is class dismissed yet?

Yes. But before you go… a few questions I’d really like you to engage with:

1. Do you notice any sort of a visceral, bodily connection with some of what we’re talking about, down in your throat, chest, and belly?

2. Is there any sort of a slowing-down sensation, either inside your body, inside your mind, or even that you notice in the world immediately around you, that you might associate with peace and stillness within?

3. Can you see, hear, or feel some of the things around or within you to be rising and falling, arising and subsiding, in a subtly altered way while you’re in the proximity of this way of perceiving?

4. What about a tiny but perceptible sensation of the goodness, safety, joy, or even sacredness of existence?

OK, class dismissed.