Meditation involves maintaining awareness. In the form of Buddhism I follow, it is an essential practice. When I was in the hospital in January of '05, I noticed how hard it was simply to be in that awareness. Partially, I'm just not used to it. It's not a theoretical understanding - it's experience, and familiarity. It's like a physical skill - all the understanding in the world is useless in comparison to actually exercising the skill.
But even trying to exercise awareness in the hospital setting was very very difficult. I wondered why. I could tell it had something to do with the fact that I was scared, and sometimes in pain. It's as though those two forms of suffering focused my grasping at my sense of self. Feeling under threat, I paid attention to my limited being, my own boundaries - I was, or part of me was, trying to protect myself.
One obvious conclusion from all this is that it's easier to do these essential meditations when not in a state of immediate suffering. And there's a warning here - better get the work done before I have to rely on it. Because at that point, I won't be able to do the basic work.
As I think more about this experience, I see that when I am very comfortable and feeling safe, I can relax my grip on my 'self'. I don't feel a need to protect my boundaries. But when something hurts me, mentally or physically, then this sense of self solidifies again.
Awareness seems to involve letting go - not what I would have thought, right off the bat, given that the word often refers to focus, and so often takes an object. In the Webster definition of "aware" it says, "aware may indicate either general information, wide knowledge, interpretative power, or vigilant perception." And the act of perception, of course, always is the perception of some thing. This is an important distinction in coming to see what meditative awareness really is, because it is not the second type - it is not the type that takes an object. It is not the sort of thing meant by phrases such as, "I was very aware of the pain in my foot," or, "I was aware of someone else in the room."
A momentary recognition of (meditative) awareness is like a switch of attention from foreground to background. Most of the time I'm occupied with foreground objects - at the moment, for example, I am occupied with the PC screen on which these words appear, and the keyboard under my fingers, the thoughts in my mind, and the words expressing them. But when I remember to recognize awareness, suddenly I am the background, and these other things are happening in the foreground. Now I watch them, even though I am also what is producing them, but I see them like a movie on a screen.
This is another clue to the whole process - foreground: tight control and focus; background: release, open boundaries. Pain and fear are alike a call to arms - they pull me out of the background (if I am there at all) into foreground focus, preparing to protect my self. So it comes back to self - the more I am myself, the more I need to take care of myself, the less I will be able to maintain this meditative awareness except during times of explicit relaxation, safety, and quiet. Recognition of emptiness and dissolution of self are what will allow me to move into the background - the 'place' of alert clarity, of, ultimately, perpetual awareness. And yet this very awareness is also the revealer of emptiness, and the solvent of self. A virtuous circle.
Recent Comments