Among the questions heard frequently at retreats and in readers’ comments lately, one keeps returning in different forms: ‘I can recognise awareness in meditation, but as soon as daily life comes back – the demands, the thoughts, the pull of the senses – I find myself lost again. How do we actually remain as awareness in the midst of it all?’
Ask yourself: ‘What am I when I am not experiencing anything?’
Imagine not experiencing any thoughts, feelings, images or memories. There are no sensations of the body and no perceptions of the world.
And ask yourself: ‘What am I in the absence of experience? What remains of myself when no thoughts, feelings, sensations or perceptions are arising?’
You don’t actually have to remove your experience – it’s enough to imagine removing your thoughts, feelings, sensations and perceptions.
Do the experiment in your experience, not just intellectually. ‘What remains of me when no experience is taking place?’ And for the moment, simply notice whatever it is you are in the absence of experience, without naming it.
I’m going to name it just to enable me to speak of it. All that remains of your self in the absence of experience is the fact of being or being aware. Being aware, but not aware of anything; just pure awareness in the absence of any objective experience.
You haven’t suddenly become being, being aware or awareness as a result of this experiment. You are always essentially that, but you mostly don’t notice it due to the exclusive focus of your attention on the content of experience. So, by removing – or even imagining removing – the content of your experience, you allow the background of being or being aware to emerge into the foreground. You become aware of your self as awareness. These three terms – ‘being’, ‘being aware’ and ‘awareness’ – are used here interchangeably.
And when experience arises again, when thoughts, memories, feelings, sensations, perceptions reappear, you don’t cease being what you essentially are. You remain as that in the presence of experience.
The process you’ve just gone through could be likened to getting undressed at night. When you get undressed at night, you take off all your clothes. And when nothing else can be taken off, what you essentially are – your naked body (relatively speaking, of course) – is revealed.
You haven’t suddenly become your naked body. You are always that, relatively speaking. But during the day, you don’t notice that because your naked body is covered in layers of clothing. And then when you get dressed in the morning again, you don’t cease being your naked body.
It’s the same when you take off, or even imagine taking off, the layers of your experience. You don’t become your naked being. Your naked being is simply revealed. It was there underneath the layers of experience all the time. But you now recognise your self as naked being.
And then when experience reappears – when your thoughts, feelings, perceptions, activities, relationships come back again – the great art of life is to remain as you are; to not allow the content of experience to veil your knowledge of your self; to remain as being, or being aware, in the midst of experience.
If the art of meditation is the turning away from the content of experience and the return to your essential being, then the art of life would be becoming involved again in the content of experience whilst remaining as being.
So, although in the early stages, meditation may seem to be something you do or cease doing with the mind, later on you realise that meditation or prayer is really nothing to do with what you do or cease doing with the mind. It is just to be as you are. It is just to be being knowingly.
Your essential nature is pure aware being, though you may not yet fully realise it. Meditation or prayer is simply to be as you are knowingly, and live as that; to know your self, to feel your self as that, and to remain as that both in the absence of experience and in the midst of experience.
