Thank you for all the comments and questions you shared during our year-long journey through The Nature of Consciousness. I have been through them with great appreciation, and I offer you this week’s post and next week’s in response.
The question asked most often, in various forms, was how to put the understanding into practice: it makes sense, and yet the experience of it seems far away. ‘I know the theory, but the reality still eludes me.’ ‘I can see the movie; the screen, not so much.’ It seems too simple for the mind, and yet strangely hard to remember that you are aware. You have read a great deal, and long for the reading to become your own experience.
The screen is present in every scene of the film. Every thought, every feeling and every word on this page appears on it, and it is what you essentially are.
Before you are aware of being a body, you are aware of being. That is awareness. Before awareness is aware of the flow of sensations and perceptions that constitute your experience of the body and the world, awareness is aware of itself, aware of just being.
Become aware of the space of the room in which you are sitting. When I suggest becoming aware of the space, you suddenly seem to become aware of the space. In fact, that’s not quite true. You were previously experiencing the space. You are always experiencing space, but you did not know it. You did not notice it. Why? Because your attention was focused on the more colourful, interesting aspects of your experience: thoughts, feelings, sensations, perceptions and so on.
Now, become aware of the simple fact of being. When I suggest becoming aware of the fact of simply being, you suddenly seem to become aware of being, but in fact this is not true. You are always aware of being, in the same way that you are always experiencing physical space, but you do not always know that you are aware of being.
You do not overlook the simple fact of being because it is mysterious, hard to find, unknown. On the contrary, it is because your being is so close, so intimate, so familiar, so well known that you overlook it in favour of the more colourful or interesting content of your experience.
It’s almost inconceivable that a landscape painter would spend her life painting in nature and overlook the presence of light, overlook the sunlight, overlook that which illuminates the world that she is painting. But that’s exactly what you do most of the time, if not all the time. You overlook the light that renders experience knowable.
Just as it is a tiny shift of attention, when you are reading a book, from the words or the brushstroke to the white paper, so it is just a tiny shift of attention from your thoughts, feelings and sensations to your self. It doesn’t require a monumental effort. Just the smallest shift of attention from the words to the paper, from your thoughts and feelings to your self.
The reason that people find meditation boring is because when they turn their attention away from the content of experience, their thoughts and perceptions, they construe what remains as an absence, a blank, a void, an absence of the colourful content of the body, the mind and the world. And they escape from that absence into thinking and imagining, or falling asleep.
This experience of boredom is an intermediary phase between the colourful content of your experience, your thoughts and perceptions, and the peace of your true nature. It is the absence of experience, but not yet the presence of your being. It is the blank, empty screensaver that seems to veil the screen.
You consider it boring because you still retain the memory of your thoughts and perceptions, and you compare meditation with them. It’s like considering the blank, empty screensaver boring because it has no colours or words on it, and you turn the movie back on.
But if you find you are bored in meditation, don’t turn the movie back on. Don’t start reading your emails again. In other words, don’t go back to thinking. Penetrate through the boredom to the peace underneath it. Look through the screensaver and see the screen.
Your knowledge of the world is mediated through thought and perception, but you have direct, immediate, unmediated knowledge of your self. Even your reading of the great tradition or the highest enlightened sages is mediated through your mind and therefore cannot give you direct access, direct knowledge of your self. Your knowledge of your self is just between you and your self. Nobody can give it to you, nor need anyone give it to you, because you have direct access to your self.
The more clearly you recognise who you essentially are, the less teaching you need. Instead of reading whole volumes, just one or two paragraphs, one or two sentences will suffice.
I am not suggesting that you try to stop thinking; that is not necessary. But if your thoughts are like the subtitles on a movie, then leave the subtitles on. But don’t read them. Let your thoughts continue, but don’t listen to them.
You do not have to change your experience in order to be at peace. You do not have to change your circumstances. You do not have to change the mind or silence the mind. And you do not have to change your body or improve your body. You don’t have to change your experience at all in order to access the inherent peace of your true nature. It’s always there, always here, always available, always present, just behind, as it were, the content of experience.
In part two, we will turn to that which can arise once the screen has been glimpsed: the mind’s frustration at having nothing to do, the force of old habits, the discouragement of the ‘I’ that feels it has lost its way, and the peace that lies beneath them all.
