An interview with Philip Jacobs

 author of The Pathless Path - A Journey to the Place Never Left 

Philip Jacobs has been generous to share an excerpt of his yet unpublished book with Conscious TV viewers here: 

"The opportunity at this stage of exhausting the search both in the outer world and in special future states of Consciousness is that we start to notice that there is nothing to look for. 

We have missed it because it is so close that it’s been overlooked as too obvious and simple. It’s rather like trying to look at your eyes without the aid of a mirror, it’s impossible since they are the instrument of seeing, so how can they see themselves? 

It’s just the same with Consciousness; it’s only eluded us as an object to find since it is itself the subject. It is already looking out through our eyes and hearing through our ears and sensing through all our senses right now. It was just as present before our search began, we haven’t uncovered it or developed it one iota. All that’s happened is that the search has been exhausted and a recognition has taken place.

We have lived with a consensus view of our identity as a result of identifying with the vehicle of Consciousness rather than with the Consciousness itself. But when we relax into what is looking out through our eyes, at first there is just nothing, it is like a vast still empty spaciousness that is also an immense fullness from which our thoughts, feelings and desires are arising and returning. Happiness arises and returns, fear arises and returns, our entire lives arise and return. All activity is just a ripple on the surface of this vastness. We are all just the waves on a great ocean of stillness. It is formless and without boundary, it is totally ordinary and ever present. Every aspect of our lives without exception, the triumphs as well as the broken dreams are all part of the pathless path, the journey to acknowledge that which was never lost and never found, was never more or less. 

You start to no longer see yourself as a separate entity acting on a separate external world, getting frustrated when it doesn’t go the way you think it should. Rather you experience yourself as the witness of an immense drama, where the One Mind plays every part in the drama. Everything is seen to emerge out of this great ocean including your own apparent thoughts, feelings and actions and you are just the great stillness that quietly observes its own play in the same way you might watch a film at the cinema.

The character you are playing will still experience sadness and joy, pain and pleasure, illness and health and whatever your role requires and yet somehow it is all different. It’s like the analogy from zen; 

'At first there are just mountains and rivers, then the mountains and river disappear, then in the end there’s just mountains and rivers again.' " 

In October, Philip Jacobs came to Conscious TV studios for an interview with Iain McNay. 
To watch the complete interview, please click here.