We have all tasted the “boundarylessness” of awareness on those occasions when we were able to suspend our own point of view momentarily and see from another person’s point of view and feel with him or her. We call this feeling empathy.
If we are too self-absorbed and caught up in our own experience in any moment, we will be unable to shift our perspective in this way and won’t even think to try. When we are self-preoccupied, there is virtually no awareness of whole domains of reality we may be living, immersed in every day but which nevertheless are continually impinging on and influencing our lives. Our emotions, and particularly the intensely afflictive emotions that “sweep us away,” such as anger, fear, and sadness, can all too easily blind us to the full picture of what is actually happening with others and within ourselves.
A Guided Meditation for Resting In Awareness
A Guided Meditation for Resting In Awareness
Through our practice of mindfulness, we have been cultivating an awareness that can become more and more stable and vivid, especially the more we practice with wise effort and intentionality. And this awareness can be either narrow or broad, depending on the circumstances it can recognize and embrace any and all sensations within the body, including the breath sensations. It can recognize and embrace seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching, as well as those activities of mind we call thinking and feeling, and it can rest in a non-conceptual direct knowing of any or all of these aspects of human experience, beyond thinking, without separation or identification.
Or if on occasion we fall into identification and separation into a subject—a me—and the objects I am observing, either inwardly or outwardly, then awareness is capable of recognizing that as well and re-establishing the knowing itself, beyond any separation, beyond any identification, beyond the personal pronouns, beyond I, me, or mine, beyond thinking altogether. So the final expansion, if you will, within this framework is to abandon the framework. In the sense that we no longer choose a focus for awareness, but allow the field of awareness to be boundless. Since awareness actually is, and always has been boundless.
We no longer choose a focus for awareness, but allow the field of awareness to be boundless. Since awareness actually is, and always has been boundless.
But as we know from our own efforts, in minds that have not encountered training and mindfulness, awareness does tend to contract and nucleate around particular arisings, especially events that have emotional charge for us. And then it tends to fixate and either be very narrow, or very self interested and self centered. Or on the other hand, to fall into utter rebellion. In other words, no awareness at all, merely obsession or dullness.
So in this moment, resting in awareness, perhaps at first allowing the field of awareness to feature the soundscape, which is as we have experienced over and over again, always here, presenting itself to our ears comprising everything that presents itself in the form of sound and the spaces between sounds. Everything, without exception. So resting in hearing, being the hearing, without necessarily creating any distance between a you and what is being heard. But simply hearing. Being the hearing. Being the hearing right now, in this moment.
And of course if there are thoughts that make their way in, letting them be known because awareness can include the knowing of thought. And expanding the field of awareness whenever you care to, to include the air caressing the skin, the air that is the breath, the air that carries sound, and resting in the knowing of the air and the breath again through the sensations in the body, since it is only through the senses, including mind, that we can know anything. And we can naturally allow a field of awareness to include of course, not just the sensations associated with breathing or the touch of the air on the skin, but any sensations and all sensations in the body right here as we sit.
And so in this moment, with the field of awareness expanded this far, we have sounds and the spaces between sounds, we have the breath and we have the air, and we have sensations in the body. That’s a lot, and it is all happening in this one moment. And it’s not separate, although we can isolate any feature of it. So just allowing it all to be present without separation in this moment, and to rest in awareness of the experiencing of it, of it all. Sitting, breathing, feeling, hearing, knowing and why exclude thinking, since it’s going on anyway. So allowing the field of awareness to expand even further to include thought, the thought stream, the bubbles of thought. And any emotional currents, eddies or whirlpools that may arise in the mind or in the heart, accompanied or unaccompanied by images and thoughts, memories or fantasies. And just allowing ourselves to rest in this awareness, this bigger basket that holds it all.
And now in one last jump, let’s allow the field of awareness to expand infinitely to allow the mind, heart to be boundless, hugely spacious, as big as the sky or space itself, with no beginning and no end, no boundary, no circumference, no periphery. No center. And rather than focusing on anything in particular, just allowing the quality of our awareness to be choiceless. To rest in the non-conceptual knowing quality of mind itself. Not seeking out anything, not pursuing anything, not rejecting anything and not featuring anything, but like an electromagnetic field so to speak, that would instantly know any perturbation any movement whatsoever that would arise within it.
So the field of awareness, like a mirror but in many more dimensions knows, detects, feels sees and senses whatever moves, whatever arises, whatever it lingers, whatever dissolves. So resting in awareness itself, in the choiceless, boundless, vast, spacious quality of awareness itself. If sound predominates in some moment, then sound is known. If the thought follows on the sound, then the thought is known as thinking now. Conceptually it’s recognized, known, felt neither pushed away nor pursued, neither condemned nor extolled.
If in the next moment the sensation arises in your lower back or in your knee and predominates in the field of awareness for a moment, that is also felt, seen, known and neither pushed away nor pursued, condemn