This Aliveness has no off switch

On the illusion of identity, the reality of Being, and the Life that cannot be lost

I didn’t know what hit me—literally. One moment, I was crossing the highway. The next, bam! Something hit me! Next, I was coming back to myself, slowly, as if surfacing from underwater, surrounded by a circle of alarmed strangers whose faces flickered with concern and confusion. A hit and run. December 24, 1998. I remember the date vividly. In fact, it's the only date from my early childhood that stands out.

News of the accident traveled home at impossible speed—faster than anyone could’ve driven. A full mile away, and still, within five minutes, the word had reached them. Brother Gabriel, a family friend and police officer who happened to be visiting, sprinted the distance without hesitation, his duty and devotion fused into motion. My parents followed, slower, weighed down by the years and the suddenness of dread, fumbling for the car keys, fumbling for control.
The moment itself unfolded like a scene from a movie—one of those strange cinematic pauses when the frame slows, the sound drops out, and the world folds into silence. I was suspended in that mute interval. The chaos around me—horns, angry calls, footsteps—muted into a soft murmur at the edge of awareness. And within that hush, two distinct impressions seared themselves into me like stamps on wet clay. Well, at least the last impression. First, the stars. Not metaphorical stars—the actual cartoon-like, spinning flecks of light I’d only ever seen in animations. They danced and pulsed behind my eyes when that car hit me. Seriously, I saw stars!

Thank you Milo Weiler for this photo

And then, the second thing—more dazling: I saw myself seeing myself. It wasn’t a dissociation in the clinical sense. It came with a sense of weird relief but still frightening at the same time. A witnessing of the witness. A moment of being both inside and outside. I didn’t have language for it then. I barely do now. But it was unmistakable. There was no effort in it. No transition. One layer of perception peeled back, and there it was—a vastness, noticing, ever-present, utterly still. Whatever had happened to my body, that part of me—if it could even be called a part—had not flinched. It was a familiar experience, and I am quite sure you know what I am talking about! You see, sometimes I would get in trouble and be called into my parent’s room to face the conseequences and somehow I would see myself seeing myself.

This seeing of one’s self by one’s self is what I believe could happen in intense suffering. I think it was Ramana Maharshi who I heard was in the throws of death when he realized he had never really known the answer to the question “Who am I?” He realized that even though his body could die, something within him remained untouched. This realization was so complete that his fear of death disappeared entirely. From that moment, he knew he was not the body, but the Self.
Likewise, Rumi would say, “the wound is the place where the Light enters you," highlighting transformation through suffering. Carl Jung in his work, “Psychology and Religion (1938), also said “Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering. Through suffering, we find ourselves.”

But what is this “Self”? Really—what is it? It’s deceptively easy to imagine it as something separate, something other. I did. For years. I imagined it as a kind of hidden entity I had to discover, reach, or become. But eventually, it dawned on me: it’s not hidden—it’s just too close to notice. So close that it gets overlooked entirely. In fact, saying it’s the closet thing to us presupposes there is a Self and then there’s an us. In truth, the Self is what is looking for itself. It’s the Self that confuses itself with the elements of its observation.

To glimpse this directly, pause for a moment and zoom in—not on your life story, but on the life itself. Not on the content of experience, but on the awareness that notices the content. Drop, even briefly, the thoughts, events, identities—the whole constellation of experience. What remains is pure noticing. Not what is noticed, but the noticing itself. That’s what I call Aliveness. Not aliveness as in breath or heartbeat, but Aliveness as the very condition for all experience. It’s self-sufficient, self-aware, self-existent. You can’t find it—because you are it. It was never absent, so it cannot be retrieved. It can’t be held, named, or pictured—because anything that can be pictured is already an object within it. If you could grasp it, who or what would be doing the grasping? This Aliveness is Life. But it becomes obscured by its own projections—the ever-changing content made of density and flux. Stories. Labels. Concepts. What we call “reality” is this stream of appearances that flicker in and out. And what flickers cannot be the Real. Yet something registers the flicker. Something notices the change. I like to say: when attention stops leaping from object to object, what remains is Awareness.

In his book, The Eye of The I, Dr. David Hawkins says, “One can retreat from involvement with the content of thought and choose to adopt the point of view of observing or witnessing. To be proficient, this does take some practice. To get a feel for it, one can practice watching out the window of a car by fixing one’s gaze through a specific spot on the window; the focus is then no longer on each object specifically but on an imaginary slit through which objects seem to stream by, and as a result, one cannot with certainty identify each object because one does not focus upon them individually.” There is something so breathtaking about this shift, so obvious about being aware of this Aliveness. Like I mentioned earlier, it is in fact so obvious that we miss it. It’s so constant it’s missed. So obvious it becomes invisible. And yet it is the only thing you can never disprove. It’s the groundless ground of our Being. The That which is always here. That which cannot die.

The more I settle into this recognition, the more I see the impersonality of all phenomena. My thoughts, neuroses, joys, suffering—they aren’t personal failures or triumphs. They’re expressions. They arise like weather systems in the sky of Awareness. Unique configurations of life expressing itself as this moment, in this form. What I once called “me” begins to feel like an effect, not a cause. A wave crashing for a moment against the shore. A sound that briefly echoes in a hollow room. The individual known as Seye becomes like the shattering of a ceramic mug: sharp, momentary, beautiful, gone. In this light, I see that I do not exist in this body—or as it. Nor does anyone else. What we are has no edge, no fixed location. And in this knowing, I see: no one was ever broken.

What I truly am simulates separation for the sake of relationship. This apparent individuation called Seye is no more separate than a whirlpool is separate from the river. And from that recognition, Love arises—not sentiment, not affection, but the clear seeing of no-otherness. Attention turned not toward “my life,” but toward Life itself generating a kind of joy in the mind that’s unspeakable. The joy of recognition.

And so, even as I type this, I know it’s all ultimately meaningless. Not nihilistically meaningless—but meaning-free, as all play is. These lines, this paper, this internet, this character called Seye—they’re just masks the Divine wears to play with Itself. Oh, this life cannot be extinguished. It is fully of Mystery.

And maybe that’s why the moment of that accident still echoes—not because of the trauma, but because of what broke through. Something I didn’t have language for at the time, but which now feels unmistakable. The stars, the silence, the crowd, the second seeing—it wasn’t an anomaly. It was a glimpse. A rupture in the veil of identification.

Even as my body lay stunned on that highway, even as voices called out and panic moved around me, something was still. Unshaken. Watching. Present. That Aliveness was there before the impact, during it, and after.

It never left.

It never came.

It never can.

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