This meditation begins by directing attention to the simple fact of experience itself - prior to interpretation or judgement. We are invited to notice the underlying presence or being that allows all experience to appear, using the metaphor of water and ripples to understand the relationship between awareness and experience.
Rather than concentrating on the breath or sensations, the practice encourages a letting go of particular experiences. The aim is to rest in the subtle, non-conceptual recognition of consciousness itself - a background sense of existence that remains constant beneath changing sensations, thoughts and feelings.
Transcripts have been automatically generated and may contain small differences from the audio, or errors.
So we’re actually going to start in a particular way by really acknowledging that there is experience. This might sound like a strange thing to say. We want to sense the kind of undeniable existence, being, presence of experience. There is experience before we begin to look at this or that experience in this or that way. Certainly before there’s any interpretation of experience, categorisation—there’s the sheer fact staring us in the face: there is being, there is experience, there is consciousness.
And these three words—being, experience, consciousness—notice that they’re kind of inseparable, they kind of imply each other. There is experience and there has to be consciousness. Without consciousness, there’s no experience; without experience, there’s no consciousness. And these kind of constitute being.
This isn’t an invitation to philosophise or to think about it. This could easily be misinterpreted that way. It’s an invitation to notice the both overwhelmingly obvious but also incredibly subtle sense of presence, of existence, being, consciousness—underneath, prior to this or that experience.
In some traditions, this is called the “I am”, the original “I am” prior to “I am this” or “I am that”. It’s not really an object that we can bring attention to in the usual sense. The way that we pay attention to the breath or to a thought—it can’t be pointed to, but it can be recognised somehow.
And every object for consciousness, everything that we can be aware of—all things—are sort of somehow made of this presence, consciousness, being. So it’s not something that stands apart, it doesn’t stand alone aside from everything else.
There are many different ways we can conceive of it. All are just partially true. Nothing can completely describe or explain this reality. We can sense that this or that experience—that which we are aware of—is like a ripple in a body of water. The ripple is made of nothing but water. There is nothing to the ripple but water. And normally we’re entranced by the ripples. What we’re trying to do here is recognise the water.
The water is the deeper reality of the ripple, just as this unnameable presence—being—is the deeper truth of experience. And while this water metaphor shows that there is nothing to experience but this consciousness, being, presence—no word really fully encapsulates it.
Another way of looking at it is as that which remains when we negate everything else—when we stop looking at this or that. So for this particular meditation practice, don’t be interested in this or that. When attention meets an experience, just kind of shrug it off: just a ripple. Attention itself can only really see ripples.
At a deeper level—a deeper level than attention, a deeper level than the ripples—we can recognise the ocean of being, the ocean of consciousness.
The mind may struggle with this invitation. It may wonder, “Is this it? Is that it?” It may try and understand, to conceptualise, to answer the question, “Is this it? Is that it?” The answer is always no and yes.
Yes—because there is nothing to the ripple other than water. There’s nothing to any experience other than being itself, consciousness itself.
And no—because no ripple, no identifiable phenomenon, identifiable thing, is that. And nothing that we can do can take us any closer to or any further from this.
It may be true that if attention can learn to slow its movement—if there’s less fluctuation between this and that—this sense of being becomes easier to recognise. This may be true, but still it is always unstoppably present. It is that which gives everything else presence and existence.
And even that description suggests a kind of duality, a kind of distinction. The processes of attention and interpretation, categorisation, meaning—these processes trick us into seeing separateness. They appear to carve out this from that.
We can recognise that this appearance of different things, separate things—this and that—this is a kind of higher-level experience, just ripples on the ocean.
We’ll just spend the last minute or so resting in this ocean of being, consciousness, existence.
Non-duality
Open awareness