Reflections on a Still Lake

A Lazy Sunday thought bubble

Swifty, Jethro, Sweetie and Ari

What if the thing we keep searching for is not hidden inside experience, but is the simple fact that experience is being noticed at all?

The fish are very convincing

Imagine standing beside a crystal-clear lake on a quiet Sunday morning and looking straight down. Your eyes follow the fish. One darts under a rock. Another flashes silver in the sun. The moss sways and a small ripple bends the scene. There is plenty to watch, so you watch it.

That is a pretty good picture of ordinary life. The fish are our thoughts, plans, memories, moods and private dramas. A thought appears and we follow it. An emotion arrives and suddenly it owns the afternoon. We become so interested in what is happening that we rarely notice the very simple fact that we know it is happening.

Now suppose the light changes and you notice your own face reflected on the surface. It was there a moment ago. Nothing had to be added. The fish did not need to stop swimming. Your attention simply shifted from what was moving in the lake to the surface on which the whole scene was appearing.

When the lake catches you looking

This is the small surprise behind 'awareness of awareness'. Normally we notice things. Then, once in a while, we notice that noticing itself is happening. Instead of asking only, 'What am I thinking?', another question appears: 'What knows that this thought is here?'

That can feel like an endless reflection. Awareness notices a thought, notices itself noticing the thought, then can notice that too. We do not need to imagine a queue of tiny observers hiding behind one another. The simpler possibility is that the same capacity to notice can include its own activity. The looking becomes part of what is seen.

Our first-person computer-game comparison helps here. We normally play as the character and concentrate on the action. The surprise is not finding a secret character behind the character. It is noticing that the game, the character and even the feeling of being the player are all appearing in experience right now. That does not prove there is literally a player outside the universe. It simply loosens the usual feeling of 'me in here, world out there'.

Hide, seek, found

Our little piece Hide and Seek plays with the same recognition. Shakti hides as stars, oceans, frogs, sorrow, laughter and ordinary people, while Shiva turns up inside the forms doing the looking. The joke is that seeker and sought are never completely separate. What seemed lost was hiding in plain sight [1].

Two old traditions, two useful nudges

Dzogchen, a Tibetan Buddhist tradition, makes a careful distinction between ordinary mind, sem, and pure awareness, rigpa. Jigme Tenpe Nyima says the key point is this distinction and that recognition can occur while thoughts are still present [2]. For our Sunday lake, sem is the habit of chasing every fish. Rigpa is not another fish. It points to recognising the clear knowing in which the movement is already appearing.

Non-dual Shaiva Tantra gives the picture a different turn. The Spanda tradition speaks of spanda as the living pulse or creative dynamism of consciousness, not a physical vibration [3]. Here the ripples need not be treated merely as distractions. The movement itself belongs to the living whole. Thought, feeling and the awareness of them can be understood as expressions of one reality rather than unrelated pieces.

These traditions are not identical. Dzogchen asks us to notice the difference between being carried away by mental contents and recognising awareness directly. Spanda asks us not to throw the movement away, because the movement may itself reveal the whole. Both make our lake a little more interesting.

This also circles back to the Froodx consciousness article. We can look from the outside for memory, response, self-reference and intelligent behaviour [4]. Yet the one case of consciousness each of us knows most directly is known from the inside. You do not have to infer that an experience is happening before you experience it. You are already there for it.

So what is the Sunday thought?

Perhaps awakening, in the modest sense we are playing with here, is not acquiring a grand new belief. It is the tiny shift from being completely absorbed in what appears to noticing that it appears. The fish can keep swimming. Life can stay messy. You can still lose your keys and become annoyed at traffic.

Every so often, though, the lake catches you looking. Thought, the person having the thought, the world being thought about and the knowing of all of it sit in one picture. The infinite reflection stops being a puzzle and becomes a playful possibility: awareness can notice experience, notice itself noticing, and keep going without ever finding a final little watcher hiding behind the curtain.

Perhaps the lovely joke is not that we finally find awareness. It is that awareness was present for every moment of the search.

That is why Hide and Seek can begin again. The lake can ripple, the fish can dart about, and we can lose ourselves in the story and find ourselves again. Maybe that is part of the fun.

References

Short sources behind the thought bubble. The analogies are ours; the traditions keep their own language and context.

No.	Author / source	Work	Why it matters here	Link
[1]	Supplied manuscript	Hide and Seek (2026)	The Shiva-Shakti hide-and-seek frame used here: consciousness hiding in forms and finding itself again.	Supplied file
[2]	Jigme Tenpe Nyima, trans. Adam Pearcey	Advice for Hor Özer (2017)	A Dzogchen source distinguishing ordinary mind from pure awareness, including recognition amid thought.	Open source
[3]	Jaideva Singh	The Yoga of Vibration and Divine Pulsation (1991)	A translation and commentary presenting spanda as the dynamic, pulsating aspect of consciousness.	Open source
[4]	Froodx	Top Ten Criteria for Consciousness	The earlier article connecting outward signs of consciousness with the harder question of first-person experience.	Open source

A playful thought experiment, not a claim that these traditions are interchangeable or a scientific proof of a metaphysical view.