Awareness is the essence of our meditation practice. It can neither be perceived by the senses nor known by thought. It is not a “thing” in the usual sense. It has no identifiable location, shape, form, texture, color, or weight. In a sense it is nothing. However, that nothing is the ever-present basis of all we experience. It is everything.
Without awareness we would not know we exist. We would not know our mental or sensory experiences. The emptiness of unconditioned, pure awareness is our fundamental nature, already and always. It is our true self.
Awareness can only be known by direct experience, and that is why we practice, to know it first-hand. Meditation is no more than dropping into a simple awareness, and dwelling in it as the center of our being. All that a teacher can do is to point you towards that experience. If you follow that pointing you will certainly know it for yourself. Experiencing a natural, unaltered, and simple awareness is experiencing precisely who you are and have always been. That awareness has no purpose, intention, expectation, or attachment. It just is.
As mentioned, we are each born into a pure and simple awareness. A young child naturally experiences one thing after another without interpretation and commentary, without separation into “I” and It.” The Buddhists illustrate this with the metaphor of a complex tapestry. When looking at the tapestry, the young child enjoys a diversity of sensory experiences, leaping with delight from one visual impression to another without a mental commentary.
However, that is no longer how it is for us. We have lost the natural unfiltered awareness of a child. Instead, we superimpose memories, stories, and meanings onto the perceived images. We are constantly interpreting and commenting on the tapestry. Rather than experiencing the tapestry as it is, we alter it with judgments, stories, and mental commentaries. Instead of the real thing we experience a conceptual abstraction. These mental elaborations rapidly take over from our brief but natural experience, affording little if any opportunity to experience what’s actually there.
Early in childhood we lose touch with unfiltered awareness. It fades from view as we develop the sense of a personal self and identity. Simple awareness goes underground, as we evolve a conditioned, selective, and preferential awareness. Our world becomes narrower, familiar, fixed, and increasingly abstract and limited by past experiences and ideas.
Why is living from our unfiltered original awareness so important? It’s the beginning of a new freedom, or perhaps I should say an old freedom. We now have the choice of experiencing and responding to how things actually are rather than experiencing and reacting to a self and world shaped by our past.
Challenges and difficult circumstances will continue. But they will be experienced by a stable and unmoving awareness. They will be held in a ground of serenity, peace, wisdom, and gentleness. No fear. No anxiety. No suffering. Just presence and being.
Our practice aims at revealing a simple, natural, unconditionedM awareness. This awareness is profoundly still, serene, present, and free. Meditation is awareness. Awareness is meditation. It is the great elixir of healing. The key is doing nothing, just being.