You wonder whether being Awareness is just one point of view while being the bodymind is just another point of view. Isn’t it just a choice? Isn’t this, in a way, a la carte sort of thing? Does it really matter whether one is Awareness or whether one is the bodymind? Or isn’t one able to toggle from one to another? In short, isn’t this a matter, really, of “taking it or leaving it”?

It turns out that it’s just not a matter of “take it or leave it.” Why not? I offer a Hegelian-inspired reply:

1. Because suffering inheres in any identity position I take that is not Awareness as such. 

“So what?” 

2. Well, when you look very closely (i.e., you’ve actually crossed what I termed “the Socratic threshold”), you discover that suffering is itself insufferable. This means that you can’t coherently or stably take your stand in any position where suffering persists. You can’t “sit still” in and as this identity.

3. What you (i.e., the mind) can do, to paraphrase Krishnamurti, is to continue to search for “escape routes.” Yet the latter only make the case in 1 and 2 all the more cogent: the volatility of your position as the bodymind keeps being revealed in the quivering-wobbling arising of the mind that posits an itch it just can’t scratch. 

4. In brief, to identify with the bodymind is to experience ineradicable volatility, which volatility is, when seen closely enough, totally untenable–that is to say, actually unlivable. 

5. For this reason, the inquiry into who truly one is naturally unfolds and widens until the only coherent answer arrives: I am Awareness.