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The Democracy of Being
For an embarrassingly long time, I thought that Being, or
awakening, or enlightenment, was something very special- hard to attain ( in
fact attainable only to a precious few), an unusual state which required many
long years of (boring) meditation practice and unquestioning allegiance to a
guru or master or church. I thought that when I finally attained it, the skies
would open up and the angels sing- and that would be it. No more suffering or
confusion, no more ego- just bliss forever and ever. Abashed as I am, I suspect I've not been alone in these
notions.
In fact, Being, or pure awareness, is and has always here
right here. My friend Richard Miller describes it something like this: imagine
yourself on a warm, pleasant day, sitting in a comfortable chair, with your
favorite beverage at hand. Imagine you've finished your work, and there's
nothing else you need to do right now. Notice your state of mind- probably easy
and relaxed, thoughts and feelings just drifting through you. How would you
describe this? Many people use words like "Perfect. Complete. Easy. Relaxed.
Open. Empty, but at the same time, full. Peaceful." You might try this
experiment and notice what words describe it for you. The point is- everybody
already knows Being.
Another word for Being is pure awareness. And here again-
it's already always present, even when we're not noticing it. After all, in any
moment we not only have body sensations, emotions, thoughts, memories and all-
we're also AWARE OF having them. Awareness is like the space in which all our
experiences are arising, unfolding, changing, and being replaced by other
experiences, moment by moment. And just as we often fail to notice the space in
a room because we're so caught up in seeing the objects that fill the room, we
often fail to notice awareness. Yet just like space, awareness is present
whether we're noticing it or not. At any moment, we can step back into being
aware of being aware. We can feel our
way back into being this witnessing presence that observes all the
every-changing contents of our consciousness.( What we can't do is think our way back there.)
And when we feel our way back into being-awareness, we begin
to notice that Being has inherent qualities- that openness, spaciousness, that sense of presence,
that feeling of being part of all our experiences and yet somehow distinct from
them. And for me, and probably for you, that doesn't quite feel like a
discovery or something new- it's like it's been here all along. And you might
even sense that while all our experiences are always changing, awareness
doesn't change. It's just here- witnessing without judging.
Feeling our way even deeper into Being, we can sense that
this ever-presence is naturally intelligent, naturally compassionate, naturally
awake. So with great relief, we find out we don't have to make some big effort
to cultivate compassion or responsiveness- it's already always here, in every
single one of us- naturally. No more than water needs to TRY to be wet do we
need to TRY or STRIVE to be aware. Awareness, Being, is already here. And since
it's already here, we don't need to join any club or pledge allegiance to any
religion to find it. We don't even need to sit on a meditation cushion for
twenty or thirty years. In fact, the gurus and the long-time meditaters are
just like ourselves- already always complete and perfect just as is.
Of course, meditation practice is very useful for some
people to integrate and stabilize this sense of Being into everyday life. It
often benefits us to notice awareness more readily, and not get caught up quite
so completely in the thoughts, feelings and sensations that are always present.
But meditation is often misunderstood (including by me) as being a state
without thoughts and feelings. That's why I often felt like a meditation
failure- I kept right on having thoughts, emotions, memories and all that. It
was such a relief to discover that I didn't need to fight with or try to change
those experiences- I just needed to step back and notice the awareness-space in
which they're unfolding. I could finally be with everything just exactly as it
is, and myself exactly as I am, moment by moment by moment.
Can it really be this simple? Yup. Thoughts and emotions and
sensations continue to arise, and sometimes they can still be really painful.
But now they arise within the vast spaciousness of awareness, which holds them
all in open unchangingness and natural compassion.
There's nothing very special about me. This is available to
anyone. For me, what's finally revealed this to me is the iRest yoga nidra
work. But all the traditions describe the same awareness. Buddhists call it the
natural mind. Arica calls it the ornamental mind. Some people call it God; I think it's what Jesus meant when he
said that "I and my Father are One."
I like the iRest work because it's so completely democratic,
and I invite you to come to a class and check it out. But most of all, I
encourage you to sit back in that chair and be Being itself.
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