Resting Within Awareness
This practice consists of becoming mindfully aware without focusing on any specific object. It is an awareness without any fixation on objects, it is wide open, lucid, relaxed and alert.
It’s sometimes called open monitoring. It’s essentially mindfulness training but without any particular object of meditation.
Awareness is the ground of all experience and intrinsic to every moment. We over-look it continuously because we get distracted by the objects that awareness gets caught up in.
What is Awareness?
Awareness is the bare observer of things, the first hand witness of all personal experiences. It is clear, lucid and knowing. The Way of Meditation is to recognise this awareness directly and rest in its clarity without intellectualising about it too much. Our awareness is the basis for all experiences, both pleasurable and painful, and is not necessarily fully recognised or understood; however all conscious beings have awareness. Awareness is a continuous thread behind all experience. For training in awareness meditation it is important to be able to discern the difference between awareness and objects appearing to awareness and to enter the stream of awareness without a reference point. Awareness is subtle, clear and immaterial which makes it difficult to apprehend.
The hardest thing is trying to grasp awareness with awareness, which can be like an eye trying to see itself without a mirror; instead a certain skill is required to rest or settle IN awareness without being drawn toward, entangled by or fixated on any objects at all. It has qualities best described as clarity, lucidity and knowing, the silent witness, or by contemplative traditions as the soul or an inner light, but all these terms are pointing to the same thing, which is intimate to everyone’s conscious experience.
“Meditation is not mind, and mind cannot create meditation. Meditation is getting out of the mind, becoming a watcher of the mind, witnessing all the stuff that goes through the mind — the desires, imaginations, thoughts, dreams, all that goes on in the mind. You become simply a witness. Slowly slowly, this witnessing becomes stronger, becomes more centred, rooted. And suddenly you understand one thing: that you are one with the witnessing, not with the mind; that the mind is as much outside you as anything else (K., T., Tenzin, Rinpoche).”
“What we are looking for is what is looking.” – St Francis of Assisi
Practice for Resting in Open Awareness
1- Activate presence through breath
2- Walk, presently, quietly, aware, without thinking, about the past or the future, without modifying the present moment.
3- Remain composed as you walk, in a loose, relaxed state, without modifying or changing thoughts, feelings, or bodily sensations; allow them all to be just as they are.
4- Simply remain alert, calm, and aware, not fixed on anything, and also not distracted either.
5- Constantly letting go of all objects as soon as they appear to your awareness. This will eventually happen instantaneously, but initially will take effort.
6- Allow yourself to remain related and clear, lucid, and at ease.
Repeat again and again in short sessions until non-distraction from present-awareness is stabilised.
Quality is always better than quantity. Five minutes of stable pure awareness without fixating on any thoughts or objects is much better than an hour of dreaming and distractions. With training, the periods of calm lucidity will expand and even subtle undercurrents of thoughts will be absent.