Awareness

Awareness is what occurs when we are no longer engaged in our thoughts as a form of reality, when we are no longer interested in how our thoughts think us.

Awareness keeps us insighted into Love. When we discipline our awareness into the method of our living we no longer need thoughts to frighten or reward us.

Awareness is enough.

The word “awareness” means directly knowing that which can be confirmed by an observer without understanding. In other words, awareness is the direct experience that occurs without understanding through the pedestrian mentality.

Awareness is the essence of all meditation and it occurs beyond the limitation of human understanding, which is inhibited by its own self-imposed parameters and bias. Knowledge is a barrier, not a bridge, to spiritual awakening. To seek awakening we must persevere beyond the mediocre mind that is merely seeking some sort of entertainment or cunning to survive. We must drop the rationale we manufacture to convince ourselves that we “understand.”

In order to “understand” we strategically place bits of information in an order that makes sense to us, which forms our logic. We then use this logic to place our thoughts in a “reasonable” sequence as a means to comprehend, which forms our thinking.

We go to church, read books and listen to speakers talk about how to fix or avoid the difficulties of our bodies and worldly life. We seek answers to problems that we can merely understand intellectually. And although our treasure trove of mental ideals is filled with the latest knowledge, we remain limited to only the knowledge we can comprehend, which is vastly limited and will never find its fulfillment through our pedestrian mentality.

Through this process of thinking we can only accumulate knowledge and knowledge is not infallible. Knowledge is always changing and developing. Throughout our lifetime many a moment arises when knowledge is inadequate – moments when we need a deeper more spacious experience.

Awareness is realized absent of thought and offers the bigger picture of our life by recognizing the Heart of our Being rather than the fears of our genetics.

When we practice separation through non-dualistic comprehension a new ability begins to emerge. We manifest awareness. This awareness allows us to move beyond emotion, thought, sensory patterns and the “small answers” that our human process of thinking is limited by.

Meditation is a lifestyle through which we live in this life as kindness and unconscionable forgiveness. From here, we end our dualistic thinking and emerge into awareness as our manner of living.

In spiritual awareness we have the direct experience of many aspects of our life that are far beyond any kind of human understanding. When we are finished with fear and seek to have the direct experience beyond what the mind can think, we place ourselves into the inner posture of awareness. Here “understanding” is no longer necessary – all duality stops.

As true seekers in this lifetime, we realize that what we seek is found. It lives within us beyond the clutter of our wants and desires. In order to allow them to drop away we must first see the bigger picture of our lifetime, which breaks the cycle of want and desire. This is why it is referred to as a “practice.” It requires diligence and the willingness to realize how petty we have become through our indifference to spiritual living.

We are here to be found. We are here to be awakened by the hand of Love. This Love is not something that is tangible to our thinking. It is so very simple that it becomes invisible to the pedestrian way of life.

It is said of a Zen Master, Huen Shah, that one day he was about to preach a sermon when a bird began to sing nearby. He remained silent, pointed to the bird, and left. Later on he said he could not have improved upon the bird, which is why he remained silent. The bird was speaking the same truth that Huen Shah was going to share, but in a far superior way.

Even with Buddha, only Mahakasyapa smiled when Buddha kept silent and looked at a lotus flower in his hand. All were anxious to hear the words, but Buddha was not speaking.

Then suddenly, Mahakasyapa laughed and Buddha called him forward, gave the lotus flower to him and said to the other disciples, “That which can be said through words I have said to you, and that which cannot be said through words I have given to Mahakasyapa.”