What is Clarity?
This is not the kind of clarity that comes from thinking harder, but from paying closer attention to your present-moment experience. The example I often use is the stained-glass window in the room where we run our classes. They might not be medieval glass. They might have been installed in the 1960s. The mind immediately files them under“not the real thing” and moves on. It dismisses them in the same way it dismisses so much as it searches for things of ‘value’ around us. But if you actually stop and look at the colours coming through —the greens, the reds, the way the light shifts — the visual experience itself is no different from what you’d see in a Gothic cathedral. Green light passing through a window. It is beautiful. But our inner narrative of value has dismissed it. Most people wouldn't look twice.
This gap between narrative and experience is where confusion lives.
Your mind tells a story about what’s valuable, what’s authentic, what’s worth your attention. Meanwhile, raw experience sits there ignored, waiting for you to notice it.
There is a great deal of similarity between the sound of waves breaking on a shore and the sound of traffic passing in the rain. One is deemed in our mind to be peaceful. The other is considered unpleasant. But the actual sounds are almost identical. The same goes for the sound of a passing aeroplane and the sound of a distant waterfall. You could swap the audio tracks, and most people wouldn’t notice. The experience is the same. Only the story around it changes.
Stripping Back the Layers
Gaining clarity is not about acquiring something new. It’s about removing the layers of narrative, judgment, and assumption that sit between you and your direct experience. When you strip away those layers, what you find underneath is surprisingly consistent: calm focus. That calm focus isn’t something you have to create. It’s what’s already there when the mental noise silences. Think of it like signal and interference. The signal — your awareness — is always clear. The interference of the mind is like filters, layers that your mind adds on top: the value judgements, the catastrophising, the stories about what things should or shouldn't be. Each time you bring your attention back to what you’re actually experiencing right now — the colours, the sounds, the physical sensations — you’re tuning down that interference. You’re stepping back into the clarity that was there all along. This is why even a short period of focused attention on something simple, like your breathing or a single point of focus, can cut through brain fog and rumination.
The Practice
You don’t need a complicated system to start using this. The core practice is simple: when you notice that your mind is clouded or foggy, focus on your immediate sensory experience. Notice what you can actually see. Not your thoughts about what you’re seeing. The colours, the shapes, the light. Look closer than you normally would. Listen to what’s actually there. Not to find a label for the sound. Listen to the sound itself. Notice how much of your reaction to sounds is based on what you think they are rather than what they actually sound like. Come back to your body and notice your present-moment experience as it passes through time. Notice the physical sensations of sitting, standing, and breathing. These are always happening in the present moment, which is the one place where our unhelpful inner narratives can’t survive.
Beneath all these layers of the mind, beneath the layers of judgment and comparison, and the constant process of dismissing our experience as not good enough, lies our awareness. The nature of awareness is calmness and stillness. And we can experience this whenever we bring our awareness into the present moment and allow ourselves to experience the passage of time. Awareness of the passage of time is the litmus test for the present moment. If we are aware of time passing, we are in the present moment. And when we are in the present moment, the confusion of modern life becomes the clarity of awareness.
