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Guided Meditation: Resting in Awareness

Hello everyone, and welcome.

One of the great possibilities of doing mindfulness meditation is to let everything become calm and quiet in the mind as much as possible. So almost, it's an undoing. There are many processes in the mind which are operating all the time, needed for our daily life. And maybe the operation of it is not something we consciously think about. But when we sit and meditate and start undoing, non-doing in some deep way, then even some of these deeper structures or processes of the mind can go for a rest for a while, take a vacation—much needed.

To give you an example of some of the deeper things, there are very strong processes operating all the time, seemingly effortlessly, for our spatial awareness, our location in space. To have a sense of where we are in space, the objects around us, the distances, and all kinds of things going on, is a healthy and important part of human life. But it is a process that the mind does. It's an engagement, and it's possible for that to be quiet, take a break, have a rest. When you do that, then there's no engagement in location and getting a sense of the space and the distance and the location of things. Things still have location, but the mind is just not operating in that way.

There are deep instincts around self, "mine." The idea of "mine" is, I think, almost built into the hardware of our mind in some deep way, like this idea of "my hand." Apparently, there are people who have brain damage who look at their hand and don't see it as their hand, and it causes some problems for them. At the same time, as important as that sensibility is, it's possible to put that to rest and to sit here without any orientation, any thought, any idea, any intuition even, that "this is mine, this is me."

This leads to freeing up awareness, attention, or attentional capacities to be aware and attentive without focusing on the usual objects, usual concerns, usual ways in which things are. It's an opportunity for attention and awareness to become clearer without complications. A simplicity of attention. A simplicity of awareness where, in a sense, there's no inside and outside. There's no "should" and "shouldn't." There is no right and wrong.

Everything is allowed to be in some very thoroughgoing, almost unconditional way for a few minutes as the mind gets quieter and calmer. At some point—for different people at different points—there can be a feeling, or a sense, say a perception, a knowing of awareness, that can feel very clear. That feels like it stands out by itself, as if it has its own kind of presence.

Whereas usually we're concerned about what we're aware of, now we become more and more sensitive to awareness itself, how it feels to be aware. And because there's no location, it might feel like awareness has no boundaries: spacious, very open, wide. Because we're not constructing or orienting around self, there can be a delightful feeling of just being aware without any concern for me, myself, and mine, and all that that brings.

This is not necessarily an easy thing to experience, but it does come as the mind gets very, very quiet and still. So I'll do this guided meditation, and even if your mind doesn't get still, maybe if you kind of follow along enough, even with your imagination, you get some feel, some sense, some intuition of what clear awareness might be like, lucid awareness.

So assuming you've got a meditation posture, appreciate that sitting here, we are relaxing and calming deeply, letting go of the concerns of daily life. Just letting go of all concerns. Taking a deep inhale, and on the exhale, a ritual of putting aside, for now, all your worldly concerns. They can be put up on the shelf to be picked up later. Relaxing and letting go.

Maybe closing the eyes, and on the exhale, relaxing the body. Softening in the body.

And letting the breathing return to normal.

It is as if breathing and attention together is a reassuring friend. Let your attention move around your body to find where you're tense, where you're holding, and on the exhale, relax that part. Relax into the reassurance that awareness and breathing maybe provides.

And with this reassurance of breathing and awareness, touch the places in the mind where you're tense and tight and concerned about things. Touch it with the breath. Touch it with awareness to reassure it. It's okay for now. It's okay to relax and put these things aside.

And relax any tension or strain connected to doing the meditation.

With a reassuring touch of awareness, your strain and tension dissolve and settle.

It's enough just to be aware.

And imagine that you're standing on a large, wide field, maybe of beautiful grass, grassland. Grass gently waving in the wind and the breeze. Clear skies, maybe some clouds and birds. Maybe it's so big, this field, it goes out to the horizon, you don't see the edge. But it's easy to see everything.

Settling back, maybe sitting under an oak tree in the shade. And just allow whatever comes to awareness to be there in the clarity of attention, of knowing. Nothing is right, nothing is wrong, just something to know, to be aware of in this vast field.

No inside and no outside.

Just phenomena that exist, arise, persist, and pass away.

With the reassurance of attention, of awareness, maybe breathing in the middle of it all, let that reassuring awareness be broad and wide. 360-degree awareness, inside and outside. Allowing experiences, sensations to appear on their own. Nothing you have to do or reach for, or look at carefully. Just know what appears to awareness in whatever way that is.

When the ears are open to sounds, there are no boundaries and limits that the ears put on how far away the sounds might be.

When we see, the eyes don't put a limit. Just open to what comes, without a boundary hard and fast.

So with awareness, awareness can have no boundaries. Even no center.

Such an awareness, attention, can feel clear, open, spacious.

Let everything rest, abide in the spaciousness of the mind.

To hear without doing anything with what's heard.

To see without doing anything with what's seen.

To sense without doing anything with the sensations.

To think thoughts without doing anything further with our thoughts.

Leaving everything alone to be itself. Without getting involved or being for or against.

Resting in the reassurance of being aware.

Instead of doing and reacting, maybe you can intuit or sense the possibility of clarity: clear knowing, clear seeing, clear hearing, sensing. A clarity of awareness.

And if there is such clarity, or intimations of it, as if it's waiting for you, let go into the clarity.

And then staying quiet and calm, whatever way you are, listen to this dedication of merit without participating, without doing it yourself, but as if it is a medicine for this boundless world, for yourself, and for others, like a fresh breeze moving through.

May whatever benefit that has come from this meditation practice today serve as a foundation for bringing goodness, kindness, and care into this world, so that there spreads throughout the land an influence of kindness, care, and goodness that spreads from person to person, being to being. So that we live together on this planet caring for each other, promoting each other's happiness and safety, peace, and freedom.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be free.

Dharmette: Consciousness (5 of 5) Conscious of Consciousness

Thank you. So we come to the last talk in this five-part series on consciousness. And I've emphasized that I don't really know what consciousness is, but I have a premise, an assumption, that it's not a thing. It's not an entity. It's not its own standalone thing that can exist independent of anything else. But it's a little bit more like a hologram, maybe. A hologram can seem very real or very fascinating, and it can be a hologram of a real object, but the hologram image doesn't exist except as a hologram.

And so consciousness is a little bit like a hologram. It's kind of the combination of all the different forms or faculties of attention we have, combining and working together, or being gathered together by the mind's capacity to construct, to have an image, or a sense, or an idea of the whole. And this is part of what the mind does. It's a constructing apparatus. It's reconstructing, constructing our ideas of the world, ourselves, all kinds of things. It's a necessary part of being in this complicated world that humans live in. And we sometimes will reconstruct things inaccurately. We can see something, and at first glance we think it's a snake, and next glance we look at it and it's actually a stick on the ground. So the mind is reconstructing things. And so it's kind of like the hologram that's all these pieces.

But it's a beautiful thing, consciousness, and it's very valuable. It's wonderful to abide in it and have the clarity. Because when awareness or consciousness feels very clear and relaxed, and not entangled and caught up with all the concerns that we have and the objects of attention, then consciousness can have a sense of clarity, of openness, spaciousness, peacefulness, qualities of freedom, qualities of happiness. It can be a kind of a rich world that seems to be in and of itself independent of what is known.

And when the mind gets very calm and quiet in meditation, where we're not engaged with our thoughts, engaged with things of the world, sometimes it becomes a very clear sense that we're aware. There's awareness but no object of awareness. It's almost as if awareness stands out by itself: conscious, but not conscious of anything in particular. That hologram can be that clear and pristine.

In my meditation practice on retreats, when it came to such a clarity and pristineness, I went to my teacher and said, "I don't know if I'm supposed to be a Buddhist, because Buddhism teaches that everything is inconstant and changing and impermanent. And I see that for everything except for this thing, consciousness, that seems to be everlasting and permanent." And rather than debating with me or explaining it was different, my teacher just said, "Keep practicing. Keep looking. Look." And so I kept practicing, with a lot of confidence and faith in this practice, until the point came that I saw that consciousness also is inconstant, can disappear, can vanish. And its vanishing didn't mean that I died, but rather there was a marvelous, unprecedented kind of experience of freedom. It can seem very frightening and unusual to have this kind of consciousness disappear and to experience freedom from that.

But I think it's one of the reasons why in Buddhism we don't reify consciousness as a thing. At least in the early Buddhism school, the basis where I'm teaching from, where consciousness is not seen as a thing, or reified, or permanent, or transcendent, or something that lasts after we die. Whatever consciousness is, it itself is part of the inconstant, changing nature of this world we live in. And the freedom we're looking for is not the freedom for an experience of anything, including consciousness, but something which is almost a non-experience, which is in between all experiences, which is freedom, the absence of clinging. And that is the most marvelous thing there is. And for me, more marvelous than this radical purity of awareness and consciousness.

So as the Buddha teaches mindfulness practice, he's teaching all these different forms of attention that we can do. He teaches recognition, the clear knowing, clear recognition of what's happening. So important, not to be overlooked, not to be bypassed. He teaches sensing, the kind of embodied feeling of experience, sensing of experience. He teaches a sensitivity to the pleasantness and unpleasantness of experience. He teaches observation as watching, seeing, abiding, resting in a seeing of things.

And when all these become stronger and stronger, more developed, more highlighted, less agitated, less preoccupied with our concerns, then at some point awareness begins standing out in highlight, so much so that we know that we're aware. You know, if I'm driving on the freeway and things are difficult and I'm late, and I'm trying to deal with traffic and trying to get ahead of all the other people because I'm late, I'm not really aware that I'm aware. I'm aware of the cars around me, and in that sense, my awareness is impoverished. But to be aware of awareness—that is a wealth. That is fantastic.

So finally, when I get off the freeway and I decide I'm going to meditate for ten minutes before I go to my meeting because I'm all frazzled, then maybe everything quiets down enough. At some point, I know that I know. I know I'm present. I know that I'm feeling. I know that I'm seeing. And so there's a kind of a higher-order understanding, knowledge, perception, that we perceive that we're perceiving. We know that we're perceiving. And at some point, the sense of awareness, a simple, spacious kind of sense of what receives all perceptions, all phenomena, kind of the medium through which it goes and has no resistance to anything. Like the hologram doesn't resist anything, everything comes through that door of the hologram to us.

And that sense of awareness can become strong, so strong that it becomes more interesting or more the focus of attention. It itself is a focus of attention instead of the other things in the world. And it's kind of a paradigm shift for some people, because some people's minds, their whole life has been concerned about things, objects of attention, and objects of thought, always kind of navigating the world of objects and things and aboutness, what we're thinking about. But the paradigm shift is to take a break, a vacation for the mind from always focusing on something, to resting in itself. Awareness resting in awareness, awareness knowing awareness.

And in early Buddhism, we're not reifying, celebrating this as being the ultimate and the final answer to everything. But rather, there's so much letting go, so much ease, so much trust in that place, that sometimes we'll find that it's massaging or it's working. Even unconsciously, it's massaging the places of clinging and holding deep in our psychology, in our mind, and providing kind of the trust to prepare us for the time when the mind is ready, the heart is ready to let go of the deepest attachments, the deepest clinging that we live by. And so this experience of awareness, of clear awareness that the Buddha focused on, is there as a platform to help this deep letting go.

And the word the Buddha used for this clear awareness—I like to translate it as a lucid awareness—is paṭissati^[1]. And paṭissati is this awareness that's so clear and present that we know that we're aware. There's a clarity around it that we know that we sense.

So the Buddha taught many forms of attention that are leading to a deeper and deeper concentration and simplicity of mind, simplicity of attention. And it's a beautiful process to do this. And there are other factors that come to bear that influence this experience of simpler and simpler awareness or consciousness. There are other faculties of the mind that affect the faculties of attention, and we can maybe call those attitudes, the attitudes through which or by which we're aware. And so I thought that maybe we can continue this series, and maybe next week, look at attitudes. Look at how attitudes might play a role in how we know the world, how we know ourselves.

So thank you very much. And I hope that you have a nice weekend, and maybe this weekend can be a time when you gift time to be curious about the nature of awareness itself, the nature of consciousness. Not to figure out what it is, but to see: what is it about awareness, what is it about consciousness that it is possible to rest in, to abide in? And maybe you can sit in a park or someplace looking at the sky or the clouds, or something, someplace safe and reassuring, and kind of explore: What is this? What would it be like to rest in awareness?

Thank you all.