So,
For this meditation,
I'm just going to ask you to come into a comfortable seated position and to close your eyes,
Because it's going to be a specific meditation that is more helpful if you close your eyes.
And as you do,
And start to settle down into your body,
Noticing your breathing,
Start to feel a more relaxed centeredness,
And one of the easiest and most effective ways of resting into meditation,
Or getting into a meditative state,
Is simply through listening.
It's a very effective way to calm and center the mind,
Particularly when the mind is busy,
Or scattered,
Or upset.
So now simply turn your attention to listening,
And we're welcoming and allowing.
We'll start with the external sounds,
Whatever sounds that you can hear in your environment.
Whatever you hear,
Just listen without a label,
Without liking or disliking,
Without a judgment or an evaluation.
So you can listen to the sound of my voice come and go,
Maybe you can hear traffic,
Wherever you're sitting,
People's voices,
The birds,
Machinery,
Wind or rain,
Whatever it is,
Simply allow your mind to be open and expansive,
And allow all these sounds just to float in and out of your awareness.
You can notice if there's a liking or a disliking to certain sounds,
But just let those judgments come and go too,
Just as you're allowing the sounds to come and go naturally.
So you notice that the judgments can just dissolve naturally,
We're not listening for anything in particular,
We're simply open and relaxed,
And as you start to be more sensitive and aware of the different external sounds coming and going,
You can take this same allowing attitude to your own thoughts,
You just listen as they pop in,
But as soon as you turn your attention to listening,
Without attaching to them or picking them up,
Just notice what happens to the thoughts,
When you simply listen,
There's a detached observer,
Just being the stillness,
As everything's just whirling around you,
Coming and going,
Rising and dissolving,
The sounds,
The thoughts,
The views,
The opinions,
Just listen with interest and mindfulness,
But with detachment,
And as you become more acutely aware of the objects of your attention,
The external sounds,
The internal voice,
See if you can start to notice and listen to the silence,
Of course silence is the absence of sound at one level,
But it's also this felt sense of just knowing the space between each thought,
Between each sound,
But also that which is the constant background silence,
To all the sounds,
To all the movements that are taking place,
Can you just notice even a moment of this silence,
And how the sounds and thoughts don't really disturb this silence,
The silence remains unmoved,
Untouched,
It's only when we get caught,
Become reactive to the sounds or the thinking,
That we lose connection and awareness of this all-pervading silence.
So now see if you can just gently turn your attention towards resting and listening in this silence,
Even in the midst of sound,
And if listening is not really the right word for you,
Just sensing,
Feeling,
That might be more resonant for you,
Because it's not a thing or an object,
But we can know it in the heart,
Through the intuition,
Or the felt sense,
And if you can sense this within your own being,
Then allow yourself to rest into it,
Not forcing it,
Not attaining it,
Or getting it,
Because it's always there anyway,
It's simply recognizing the all-pervading silence,
And if you're able to tune more and more into this silence,
You can go deeper into understanding and recognizing the way the mind fabricates a subject and an object.
So just notice if you feel,
Or you're conceptualizing,
That there's a subject here,
Listening to a silence,
Or a subject listening to a sound,
And start to see and investigate how this very notion of a subject is constructed.
We feel like we're a center,
Located in space and time,
And that there's a me doing meditation,
And a me listening,
But where is this subject?
Where is this me?
These notions of subject and object are both creations of the mind,
And this can take a bit of time to understand this,
To feel this.
This is why we practice sitting in meditation,
But in another sense it takes no time at all,
Because it's beyond time,
So it can only be realized when the concept of time itself dissolves.
All notions,
All concepts of subject,
Object,
Time and space collapse,
But we can't make it collapse,
Because that would just be the ego mind trying to do something,
To get something,
And this just perpetuates further delusion.
So we simply notice,
We just notice how we're constructing,
Where we're constructing.
We observe how the self keeps perpetuating itself through thinking,
Through objectifying objects and sounds,
Objectifying a subject,
And so on,
And the practice is simply seeing through the delusions consistently,
Constantly,
And then things may eventually collapse and dissolve.
It can happen for a moment,
It can happen for long moments,
But there's no expectation,
No demands.
We're okay exactly with what's unfolding now,
And we're awake to it,
Alert,
Aware,
Listening,
Without a listener,
Experiencing,
Without an experiencer,
And when we do that,
Life can easily flow like a river that's unobstructed,
And of course sometimes there are obstructions,
But we simply wake up,
As all we have to do is to wake up to where we're stuck,
Where we're blocking the flow of the river of life,
And it's just that gentle waking up,
That mindfulness,
That allows the obstructions to dissolve,
And then our practice,
Our so-called practice,
Becomes natural,
Peaceful,
Not forced,
Not contrived in any way,
Just ordinary,
But a different kind of ordinary,
As the obstruction of me dissolves continuously.
