Awareness

This talk centres around awareness, its quality, how it is shaped by our previous experiences and how it can contribute to suffering or freedom in our everyday life. Originally recorded during a virtual meditation sitting via Zoom for the Tallowwood Sangha.

Transcript

As you know, I give these short talks, Supposedly short talks to begin with. And it's not necessarily something that you have to learn or something that you don't know. I think it's mainly just a reminder to try to inquire into areas of consciousness, Of life, Of practice, That are important in getting an understanding of how to live a free and open life as a human being. So I thought tonight I would talk about awareness, Which comes up obviously a lot in all the spiritual practices. And sometimes it's given a sort of a special awareness for the capital A. But of course it's nothing special. It's how we all perceive the world. And we sort of start, If you like, By perceiving things by the senses, The outer world. You can see what's happening on the screen. You're aware of what's happening in your room. You can hear my voice. So you're aware of the situation that's occurring around you. And also we can be, Of course, Aware of the responses to that stimuli. We can be aware of our inner thoughts and feelings. All this sort of spans this whole area called awareness. And I just kind of divide awareness up, If you like. Obviously, Ultimately it cannot be divided. But to enable conversation and inquiry, The convention, We will divide awareness up into what I call distorted awareness, If you like, And clear awareness. So these are arbitrary terms just to make a classification, If you like. And talking about awareness, We need to look into the quality of awareness, I think, Which is important. And when we look at how we perceive the world, How we experience, We can see how this perception can either contribute to suffering or to freedom and an open relationship to life. And so we have this what I call distorted awareness. We can see that in the way we respond to what we perceive. So initially we perceive something, We're aware of something that comes into our consciousness. And then we then interpret that awareness. It's in that interpretation that the distortion arises. Because that interpretation is coming from our past experience. That interpretation comes through the experience of the self, The construct of self. So it's distorted by memory and image and views and opinions and judgments and comparisons. And there's a division that's created very quickly here between the subject and the object of our awareness. So subjects and objects are necessary constructions. It's how we interpret the world and how we live in this world. But in the deepest reality, It's not necessarily the truth of how things are. So when we get caught in identifying the subject or the object of our awareness, We are constricting and confining ourselves to seeing the world in a very limited way. And as we've said in past talks, All this division creates friction and suffering. So if we bring our direct attention to this whole area of objects, Subject and object, And this very act of being aware, If we bring our attention to that, We call this being mindful. It's this mindfulness practice that's very common. But this mindfulness practice is not necessarily seeing things as they are because we are directing it from our construct, From our self, From our I should be more mindful. Seems to me that we are mindful when that awareness is informed by our understanding and our wisdom. And in Pali, This is called Satipa Sampajanya. And Satipa Sampajanya is used to translate this as clear awareness. So it's perceiving with awareness. It's perceiving with understanding and wisdom. And of course in the tradition, That wisdom incorporates seeing things as being impermanent and seeing things as being not self, Not inherently separate from the perceiver. So falling away, Allowing this whole idea of division between subject and object, The understanding is that it's a convention. It's a convenient way of seeing the world. But in truth, The perceiver and the what is perceived cannot be separated. There's nothing to be aware of. There's no awareness. There's no wearer. So being clear awareness, If you like, Then is bringing mindfulness and understanding to our perception. It does not identify with the subject or the object. It's just a clear, Mindful awareness. And in our day-to-day life, We have moments of awareness. Probably a great percentage of our awareness is not tainted. It's clear awareness. We just perceive some experience, Some moment through our senses. It might be the sun on the leaves or the beautiful sunny day or the rain falling or the sound of the rain. And none of this is then creating further overlay of problems or not making anything else of the actual bare awareness itself. But as we all know, There's so many incidents where in our relationships, In our relationship to each other, To our environment, Social conditioning, Our awareness is problematic. Because when we see through the image, When we make something of the awareness, It can be problematic when the self enters into the awareness. So it's what I want, What I don't want, What I like, What I don't like, What I judge, What I compare. We're then caught in seeing what is arising through the subject through an identification with the subject. And we can be aware of that. We can be aware that is what we're doing. Not that we shouldn't be doing it. So we're cultivating in the practice being aware of what is. Not what we would like to be or not. Can we see and relate to things as they truly are? That sounds pretty easy, But actually it's because of our conditioning and what we bring to that moment of awareness. It's not that easy. We've got to have it in a pattern of seeing the experience through the limited view of the self. And that limited view is all the opinions, All the views, All the social conditioning, All the background we bring to that moment of awareness. And without recognizing that's what we're doing, Without the understanding that's what's happening, We tend to get caught in and make something of the event. Either we react or we grasp or want and then we're disappointed. Sometimes, When we talk about being aware of what is happening in the inner life, We can get caught up with the idea of introspection. Introspection and awareness are entirely different things. Introspection is looking at the inner world through the lens of the self. So then we get caught up in self-improvement. Awareness without the subject is just noticing what's arising because in introspection we tend to cover what's arising with value judgments. I shouldn't be angry. I should be more aware. So this self gets invested in the activity of awareness. So of course awareness is also not critical or analytical or conceptual thought. That all comes after the initial awareness. Can the awareness continue even when the analytical thought and the conceptual thought arises? What tends to happen, In my experience, Is we have the awareness and as soon as we start analyzing what's happening, We're caught in the analysis. It's confirming the self. We lose the awareness of just what is happening and what am I doing. And how did I end up here? Upset, Reactive, Disappointed, Fearful. Did I notice that shift, That investment? So as I say what all this is doing when we enter into like this is it's just more identification more construction, More fabrication, More restriction, A more limited view from the view of self, From my experience. And because of the fragility of all this, As we know, Of this construct, We need to be constantly reinforcing ourselves. We have to find that in our awareness that agrees with my view. Because that which it doesn't is threatening. So if we come back to that clear awareness, That untainted seeing, Just that looking, There's no looker, There's just the acknowledgement of what is. It's unconstructed. We can't locate it. We can't define it even. It's a magical mystery, Mystical thing, Awareness. Not caught in time. I can't know it. I just am aware of this function of mind, If you like. And it has no center. It's incredibly expansive in its nature. So that is just reflecting life as it is right now. Includes the limitations of the body. There's these aches and pains. Without the overflow or the complication of judgment and the views and opinions. And out of this clear awareness, Out of this simple knowing, If you like, This simple act of revealing what is occurring, What that brings is incredible stillness of mind. And it's a felt sense of the immensity and the wonder of life. So you could say that awareness is the doorway, If you like. The simple act of awareness is the doorway to awakening. Thank you, Everyone.

Reviews

Excellent talk thank you Will
Love and blessings to you

Very much enjoyed this breakdown of awareness. Adding many notes ❤️