The ocean of awareness

So we’ll begin by just clearing out the sense that we know anything, really—the sense that we know what it is to be here. This is quite an important step. We want to cleanse the palette of the mind, get rid of, for now, or suspend temporarily, the kind of built-in sense that we have things a little bit figured out. Just recognise: we live in a mystery; we are a mystery. If we can authentically practise from this place, with this attitude, a lot will be possible. If we already know the way things work, what I am, what my breath is, what my body is, then not so much will be possible. So find some way to inhabit this beginner’s mind, as if you just landed into this consciousness, into this body, heart, mind, and you’re investigating it for the first time. Then we’ll spend some time just recognising the sensations that make up your experience of your body. We don’t so much want to think about bringing attention to the body in this laboured, effortful way of lassoing attention. Instead, we can recognise that the body is always held, lit up by awareness, and we just kind of brighten this awareness, or lean into this aspect of our experience—sensing all of the ways in which your body is known right now: the temperatures of the body, the sensations around the skin, around the outer reaches of the body, the sense or feeling of the air or the clothes against your skin, the patterns of tension that ripple through the body here and there, the subtler sensations, the tingles in the fingers, the sense of vibration throughout the body in different ways, in different places—and even the sense of space that the body inhabits. And just becoming aware of how your emotional state is showing up in this experience of your body. If there’s agitation, there might be a certain movement, buzziness, jaggedness to your experience of the body. If there’s relaxation or joy, there might be a kind of warm glow permeating the body. If there’s tiredness, that might be this downward current throughout the body. And there are countless unnamed, subtle shades of our emotional life that will flavour and colour the body. Recognise and fully allow this to be as it is. We’ll spend a couple of minutes just resting with the breath in the body—the whole galaxy of sensation that makes up your experience of the breath. Not just the movement of air, not just the movement of the belly, but something that this whole body-space is animated by—this breath bringing movement, aliveness and change, energy and vibration into this whole space. We’re going to lean in a little bit to the sense of awareness as something that holds the whole body. So as we tune into this space of the body and the breath moving within it, maybe we can recognise that this space is not a physical space. How could it be? In my experience, it’s a space of awareness. It’s a subjective space—or if the word “space” isn’t helpful for you, it’s a field or a realm. And just recognise that awareness, consciousness, can be felt as the ground of this space. One way to help this is just to tune into the sense of knowing associated with any experience. So there’s the experience of the body—the body is an object arising for us—and there’s the sense of knowing, the sense of that experience being met not by another object, not by another thing in our experience, but by this very quiet, still sense of subjectivity. We just want to, to whatever extent is possible right now, tune into this—the field of awareness holding the body. And it’s a different way of tuning than if I were to say, “Bring attention to this or that, bring attention to your breath.” It’s actually wider and subtler than attention. And attention itself—the movement of focus from this to that—this can be held too, and witnessed by this background awareness. It’s more a recognition of something always present rather than looking at an object. So we recognise this background; we rest in this background awareness. And the body, the mind, the heart, the senses all kind of play, all do their thing—create sensations and experiences. We want to try and begin to get the sense of these sensations, these objects, arising out of this field of consciousness. And sometimes a metaphor can help to make this more tangible. So you might sense awareness as a body of water—a lake or an ocean—and each sensation a kind of ripple or an eddy or a current in this body of water. We can practise this with some different sensations to hone this sense. Tune into one of your fingers—and always in your fingers, there are these subtle vibrations. Sense the quality of change, this rapid oscillation, this rapid vibration, and feel it held in the field of awareness. Notice how this vibration in one of your fingers is a kind of arising within this field of awareness. It’s not like it comes from somewhere else; it doesn’t just sort of arise out of something other than awareness and then awareness catches it. This is the slightly deluded way that we often conceive of experience—it’s there somewhere, other than in awareness, and then we notice it. We want to undermine this sense and see what’s really going on. And we can try it with sounds. We rest in the background of awareness, and we notice that a sound arises mysteriously out of this background and then it falls away again—it dissolves back. Each sound like a ripple, a wave, a disturbance in the ocean of awareness. Tune back into your body, allowing your whole body to be held in awareness, as it already is anyway. Sense the body as this ever-changing, shifting play of ripples and currents in the ocean of awareness. It’s a more complex system of currents and ripples than a sound or a tingle in a finger. And there’s some sense, probably, that all of these sensations and experiences are somehow tied together to create a unit that is a body, or a “me.” This tying together is something that you are, on some level, doing subconsciously. If we can begin to notice it and hold it with awareness, we may be able to relax this tendency a little bit. It’s just a habit—a habit to join the dots between the galaxy of sensation that makes up your body, to join it up into a unit. Just notice that as a kind of effort, and relax it. We don’t need to do that right now. Let ripples be ripples and waves be waves, and resist the need to make sense of it all and turn it into a thing. This might be something that you need to keep doing—the body may try to reassert itself as a thing, as an object—and we just recognise that it’s a swirling, dancing mass of experience, all arising out of consciousness, made of consciousness, none other than consciousness. And this recognition sort of cuts through the fiction of the body as this solid, unitary thing. And with this habit of tying together these wispy sensations, these ripples and waves that are none other than experience itself, consciousness itself—with this habit of tying these together into a body—there’s a corresponding habit of pretending that this body is the subject of experience, that this body is actually the one receiving experience. Notice now—be very clear—I am experiencing the body from this background of awareness. And the sense of “me” that may arise, the sense of “this is me”—this too, it’s an experience. And this experience normally corresponds with some tension, a kind of holding together again, a kind of clinging on to these appearances in consciousness. And this is subtle and not so easy—but it’s possible, it’s very possible to witness this sense of “me” as an experience. Be clear that the body cannot possibly be part of the subject—cannot possibly be what is watching everything else—because the body is here, arising in consciousness. And we’ll spend the last few minutes in silence, staying with this recognition: the body, the mind—all things—held by, made of, none other than consciousness.