When we cease to try and surrender to awareness, the world takes on a different light…

“Ceasing to try”- ceasing to be anywhere else but here and now… sitting in stillness in quiet and calm awareness. There is nowhere else to be and no one else to be. Sitting in stillness with our ‘choiceless awareness’ is in direct contradiction to the core of our highly conditioned “self”- to be anything less than doing, striving, controlling, imagining, thinking, etc. We are constantly in motion, busy trying to influence the outcome of our moment-to-moment living. More often than not, our measure of doing and acquiring leaves us short of fulfillment.

In just being, the ’emptiness’ of this mind-body process allows us to stand where we are- to be ourselves without pretense or expectation to be anywhere or anything else. Just being ourselves is inherent to our practice- and allowing our moments into ‘choiceless awareness’ to flow forward to reveal the light of their truth- reflective and pure- and absent of self-conscious thought, opinion, judgment, etc.

Here where we sit quietly in the middle of our direct mind-body experience, we look for nothing as the awareness of self-observation reveals what emerges and becomes on its own.  The energy of our intention to simply sit and watch brings forth what shall come to be known in this ‘choiceless awareness’. Nothing, but to be with ourselves, and with whatever comes to be in our just being in the here and now.

With gentle attentiveness and relaxed alertness, we focus in on what is arising while remaining aware of our surroundings. To let be, life has an interesting way of breaking into our awareness to reveal the quality of our response to it. In the process of awakening, we merge with refined sensitivity into the act of “awarenessing”- focused yet expansive as we “dial” in and out the arising events of consciousness. Gentle yet determined, we remember even in our streams of unconscious endeavors to come back again and again to being wakeful- and to seeing how our mind states can be both fuel for our suffering and our happiness.

Today, doing more and having more are strong societal measures of our success, but inwardly we are still rather paupers in the fulfillment of true happiness. The longings of heart still burn deeply in our consciousness, but yet this frontier seems overlooked for the sake of pursuing the conventional and the conditioned. We communicate with such eloquence and opulence of speech, but yet the words often manifest as empty rhetoric. Our relationships appear to suffer as we are so busy tending a field of burgeoning technology rather than the inherently rich soils of shared and collective consciousness. Just being allows us to step back into the expansive frontier of the human psyche. As meditators, we are like “psychonauts” (R. Thurman) exploring and examining the unknown of our expansive minds for the sake of our own humanity.

The radical shift in our individual consciousness is to be more at home within ourselves… to be sensed, felt, and shared with the collective consciousness of others. The challenges to living more fully- with deeper happiness and less suffering- lie within the depths of our own consciousness. It is through the light of awareness that we begin to illuminate and penetrate our life’s obscurities. Just sitting and being may not seem all that important or meaningful- but for many who routinely do- it can be a real life changer.

Comments