The Cosmology of the Awakened Body: An Orientation to Reality as Lived Form

Reality is already whole.

Presence does not belong to a self, a body, or a history. It is not achieved through effort or sustained through practice. It is the ground in which experience appears, immediate and intimate, without division between inside and outside, self and world.

This is the case whether or not it is recognized. Reality is present before insight and before interpretation, in moments of clarity and in moments of confusion alike. Nothing needs to be added for reality to be whole, and nothing is missing when it is not clearly seen or known. Recognition here does not refer to a special state, but to reality being evident. 

Many people encounter this directly at different points in life. Some through meditation or contemplative practice. Some through devotion, love, crisis, beauty, or loss. Others without naming it at all, as a quiet sense of immediacy, simplicity, or rightness that does not require explanation. At times this recognition arrives as a glimpse, sudden, ordinary, and complete, opening new possibilities for how life is lived. Nothing new is acquired in these moments; what is recognized is what has always been the case. If anything, it is more like something has fallen away.

However, recognition does not automatically settle the conditions of daily life. Glimpses do not release us from our karmic circumstances. The body may remain tense or disconnected. Relationships may still feel charged, confusing, or fragile. Identity may loosen in moments, yet reassert itself in daily life.

Habits continue until they don’t.
Recognition does not stand apart from lived conditions.
Reality lives as the body, and the body is reality as it is lived.

Awakening is not separate from ordinary life, nor does it require leaving the body or transcending the world. It is reality knowing itself as it is lived through sensation and relationship, as a human life. These domains are not replaced or transcended; they are how awakening lives.

Non-dual realization reveals what is true.
Embodiment reveals how truth lives.

The Cosmology of the Awakened Body is grounded here: in the understanding that presence meets itself as form. This meeting is not an attainment or a resolution. It unfolds, often unevenly and in layers, as the ongoing clarification of how reality is lived through body, relationship, and world, simply as they are.

Continue reading the companion to this text: Availability and Embodied Organization