Awakening In Meditation - Episode 6

Episode 6 of the Nature of Meditation podcast is about Awakening in Meditation.

Nature of Meditation monthly podcast is an exploration of the nature of silent meditation practice. Produced by Ayla Michelle at The Therapy Garden, a BAMBA accredited, registered and supervised mindfulness teacher.

Transcript

Hello,

My name is Michelle,

And welcome to Episode 6 of the Nature of Meditation podcast.

So,

As usual,

Let's start with our three-minute silent meditation practice to begin to arrive more fully into our senses,

More fully into the present moment.

So let's just sit together in stillness and silence,

Just for three minutes,

And try and notice the effect of the stillness and silence on your mind and body.

So back in the present moment,

In this episode,

I'm sharing my understanding of awakening in meditation practice,

And I come at it from different angles.

So we're looking at what is awakening in meditation practice.

In an everyday sense,

Waking up denotes the stop of sleep,

And a coming into wakefulness,

Conscious wakefulness.

So,

Perhaps it's fair to say that there's a connotation of unconsciousness with sleep,

And of consciousness with being awake.

Now,

That's a very crude black and white polarity,

And of course,

It's not as simple as that.

And we don't have mainstream understanding and experience of consciousness and unconsciousness in mainstream society,

Because the science we use is not set up to investigate those two things in any depth.

So let's get started anyways,

As best we can,

With the subject of awakening.

As best we can,

Given the conditions that we find ourselves in,

The causes and conditions that we must operate within,

Regardless of them being right or wrong.

So,

I'd like to start from an energetic level,

Where we can understand awakening as arising,

An acceleration of energy,

Or qi to use a traditional Chinese medicine term,

Qi being the life force that flows through the mind,

Body,

And universe.

Energetically then,

Awakening is an energetic process that occurs within our consciousness and within our body cells.

It's a rising of energy,

A rising of consciousness,

Like the sun coming up in the morning,

And you being able to see things as they are,

And you experience being spiritually uplifted in an embodied and experiential way.

I just felt the need to add the word embodied to spiritually uplifted,

And that really is key there.

So we're spiritually uplifted in the cells of our body,

Because the mind is in the body,

It's not outside the body,

And it's not just in the head.

So coming back to Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh's teachings,

As I was a student of his for many years,

And he asked his students to wake up and smile,

And think of the next 24 hours as a brand new life.

So I'll quote him,

Begin quote.

Waking up this morning,

I smile.

24 brand new hours are before me.

I vow to live fully in each moment.

End quote.

So awakening,

Awakening requires presence in each moment,

Without any distraction or resistance to all that is,

Or oneness,

Or connection with the universe.

And it's about experiencing a state of presence where you're fully engaged in the moment,

With your body and your senses,

Without being carried away by thoughts and fantasies of the past and future.

So being spiritually awakened is to realise that there's a continuous stream of commentary in the mind,

But that recognition of this stream of thoughts is itself not the commentary in your mind.

The recognition is your higher consciousness,

Your awakening.

And this awakened presence allows you to experience being alive more fully and acutely.

So coming back to our energetic metaphor,

We can understand awakening then as a rising or acceleration of energy,

A rising and acceleration of the frequency and vibration of your energy that flows freely and smoothly,

Unimpeded by blockages,

Thoughts,

Fantasies that can lead to dissociation,

Confusion,

Imbalance,

Stagnation,

Dysfunction,

Etc.

So when energy then is flowing freely,

Unimpeded by the mind's thoughts,

Fantasies,

Unimpeded and unattached to the mind's thoughts and fantasies,

The free flow of energy naturally leads to an awakening of consciousness and an experiencing of heightened sense perception and increased alertness.

And so it's an expansion of free conscious awareness and clear perception.

Beyond the ego with its automatic thinking and fantasizing,

And beyond the illusions that our senses have been tuned to resonate with by our culture and society,

By the mainstream structures,

Frameworks and paradigms that we must all resonate with.

Attune to and live within.

But there is a possibility for awakening within all these causes and conditions.

Because awakening is inherent within everyone and it's intrinsically pure and complete.

And awakening is an act of grace.

You cannot make it happen and neither can you prepare yourself for awakening.

It's not something that can be produced through meditation.

And we can't make ourselves or force ourselves to awaken.

And we certainly can't force other people to awaken.

There isn't a sequence of logical steps that lead to awakening because it happens naturally as an open field of awareness.

As your true nature.

Where perception and experience are free and clear.

And bright clarity appears within you and around you and reflecting it,

You become free,

Vast and interconnected to everything.

So awakening is a deeply personal experience of the nature of reality.

Because it involves this shift beyond the ego.

Allowing for a greater sense of freedom.

A greater sense of truth and a greater sense of reality.

Beyond and outside of the combines of our hegemonic zeitgeist,

Whatever it may be.

Beyond and outside of the causes and conditions from our culture and society.

So stepping out of all ego identifications.

Created by and with our culture and society.

Stepping out of all automatic habitual thinking.

We come to experience the present moment more directly.

More fully and more truly.

So,

Let me try asking a question.

It might be a trick question.

But it's only a trick question because in all honesty we don't have the conscious awareness.

I always think it's quite a shame that adults in western,

Contemporary,

Neoliberal,

Materialistic,

Cartesian society don't have the maturity to acknowledge and accept how limited our consciousness is.

So of course it does take a lot of pure conscious energy to be able to acknowledge the lack of consciousness.

So,

My question is,

Are you awake right now or are you dreaming?

So,

You're not supposed to think about the answer.

See if you can have a felt sense.

Notice what you're doing.

Notice if you felt drawn to think about an answer.

Are you a little bit awake or are you a little bit delusional or misguided or uncomfortable?

Are you a little bit unconscious?

Are you a lot awake or are you a lot delusional?

How do we answer this question?

How do we answer the question when awakening is not an answer,

It's not an end,

But an unfolding,

An evolving,

Continuous process of becoming awakened?

To experience more than what you think.

An awakening process to experience the world more fully and to experience infinite connection.

So,

Awakening then is an expansive process in which your consciousness makes a shift or a quantum leap.

Into being the nature of reality.

So,

I'm going to draw on Mahayana Buddhism a bit now.

The Buddhist tradition that I am based in and have been for over 20 years.

So,

From a Mahayana Buddhist perspective,

Our natural awakened nature is referred to as Buddha nature.

The original natural awakening within all of us and indeed the word Buddha means awakened one.

But because human consciousness is limited,

We are only awakened partially,

Not fully,

In our everyday lives.

And this may sound like a strange thing to say because it goes against what we're taught in schools to believe.

But this understanding that the human being is not awakened has been understood for millennia since before the time of the Buddha.

Has been understood since the very beginning of Western psychology that the mind is largely unconscious.

And as you may or may not know,

My background is also in psychoanalysis where we understand the the difference between primary process,

Which is the unconscious,

The primary process of functioning of the human mind,

And secondary process,

Which is consciousness,

Which comes much,

Much later in the functioning of the human mind.

But,

Of course,

The science that we use was unable to accept the understanding of psychoanalysis and of Oriental psychology because it has chosen to uphold,

Cartesian science has chosen to uphold consciousness as prevalent and primary and central,

Even though,

Of course,

It isn't.

So,

Unfortunately,

Our mainstream Cartesian science and our neo-liberal individualistic culture are unable to explicitly accept this fact of lack of conscious awareness as a normative reality in the human condition.

And in human functioning.

And it cannot accept this lack of consciousness because to do so would be to contradict and debunk Cartesian science's emphasis on cognitive thinking following Descartes,

I think,

Therefore I am.

And it would also debunk the neo-liberal paradigm of a belief in a separate individual self.

So,

I would argue that the very reason why the concept of awakening is so central and foregrounded in the Western understanding of Buddhism is simply because it's one concept that reflects,

Mirrors,

Amplifies,

Consolidates and reinforces the Cartesian neo-liberal emphasis on consciousness being primary.

If we didn't have this emphasis on consciousness in Cartesian science,

I know for a fact I would not be teaching about awakening now.

No way,

Jose.

But there you go.

We live in these causes and conditions and we must operate within them.

So,

Coming back to awakening,

A shift in consciousness where we recognise that the constant stream of thoughts is not our true nature.

And we can experience a deeper sense of presence and awareness and transcend the limitations of the individual ego.

So,

Awakening then is a dis-identification from the mind's incessant chatter and a stepping into a state of more pure awareness,

A more true awareness.

Of reality as it is.

Of an unconditioned reality beyond the confines of what our culture and society believe truth and reality to be.

And so,

I'd also like to mention the Chan Buddhist tradition which Thich Nhat Hanh's Buddhist tradition was based on.

And Thich Nhat Hanh's Buddhist tradition is an adaptation or a modification of a more traditional classical Chan Buddhist tradition.

And I feel it's necessary to say that in producing this episode on awakening,

I did feel the need to stay very close to traditional Chan masters' teachings on awakening for awakening,

For brightening and clarity of understanding.

Because it was the realisation of Chan Buddhism that awakening is the realisation of one's true nature.

Which is the true nature of the universe and the world.

So in the Chan Buddhist tradition,

Natural awakening is another word for silent illumination.

Or the Chinese word is mozao.

I don't know if I'm pronouncing that correctly or not.

So silent illumination is a form of meditation without an object in which no attention is paid to any specific phenomenon.

And I'm drawing on the teaching of Chan master,

I can't pronounce his name,

Guo Gou.

And he was one of the closest students of the late master Shen Nian.

So much of this teaching in this episode is drawn from Chan master Guo Gou's book Silent Illumination.

And also I'd like to say that it wasn't the inspiration and the impetus to lean on Guo Gou's teachings was not reading his book.

Most certainly not.

That was not the support.

The main support came from being one of his students and a student of other Dharma Drum Mountain Chan masters and having true student teacher relationships with Dharma Drum Mountain Chan masters.

And I would like to say most of all it is those true connections.

Connection being the operative word.

True connections from true nature to true nature.

Or from Buddha nature to Buddha nature.

It is those true connections made of oneness and born of oneness made of true nature and born of true nature that awaken sustain and support and guide on the path of awakening on the path of self transformation.

So let's turn now to silent meditation practice.

So awakening in meditation practice is the shift in consciousness where you become more present and aware.

There's a sense of increased presence and an expanded awareness and an interconnectedness or a oneness.

And this can be experienced in meditation it can also be experienced in relation to objects and sentient beings and people.

So in experiencing awakening we experience a unity with things within us and around us.

And we perceive and experience more clearly and more directly more brightly.

We experience true nature as unnecessary thoughts fantasies,

Desires,

Patterns identifications clear away.

A metaphor of the clouds in the sky clouds of ego identification pass and we're left with the clear sky.

We're left with the sun the moon and the stars where the mind becomes a perfect clear mirror in true awakened nature.

So meditation is a way to reveal one's true nature which is connection to everything.

In a more depth psychology terminology it reveals the inner psyche which is long and well understood in depth psychology that of course is not prevalent in mainstream psychology in the West which is individualistic.

But all of these teachings that I share in this can very easily be translated into Western psychology concepts,

Theories terms.

There is nothing new everything is known it's just that in society the mind has to use the lowest common denominator the most basic simple easiest concepts and theories for everybody to use.

So unfortunately many of the true concepts and theories don't come into mainstream society.

So awakening reveals the collective psyche and this collective psyche this interbeing that naturally occurs is not part of our individualistic neoliberal paradigm but despite the I'm going to call them adverse conditions we can still meditate to be in a state of natural awareness to be in an awakened condition unaffected by societal and cultural norms.

So in meditation we can come to experience the mind being clear and all embracing.

So why don't we sit now for a few minutes putting down all this complicated thinking for a few minutes as best you can and not worrying if you can't put down your thinking that's ok,

That's completely natural not to be able to put down your thinking especially considering we've just had a theoretical teaching but I invite you to let it go now for a few moments and let's see if we can just be in the present moment just as it is with everything that's here,

Our thoughts,

Feelings all negative and positive experiences So I'd like to end this episode on awakening here and if you'd like to learn more about theory of awakening from a western Buddhist perspective I recommend you listen to teachers such as Alan Watts or Eckhart Tolle as these are well established experts in the field of awakening and maybe I would also like to share my thanks and gratitude for the guidance and support I received from fellow practitioners in the vibrational medicine field whether it be Qi Gong Tai Chi or healing practitioners so I feel aware of their presence I feel aware of my connection to them in making this episode on awakening and I think it's important to note that I am reliant on the teachings of other teachers teachers that I know personally that are close to me that I have in person relationships with and teachers that I don't know personally some that are still alive some that have passed away and teachers going back to the founders of western psychology Freud and Jung discovering the unconscious and the collective psyche and going further back to philosophers and going back to the Buddha and the Vedic and Tao teachings beyond the Buddha okay so I hope you enjoyed this episode and I look forward to creating another episode for you bye for now