BEING HOME WHILE RETURNING HOME
Don’t go to the tangled jungle looking for the great awakened elephant that is already resting quietly at home in front of your own hearth.
LAMA GENDUN RINPOCHE1
Once there was a fish who had heard tales of the Source of Life, which would bring whoever found it their heart’s desires. The fish swam to every corner of the ocean, asking: “Where is the Source of Life? How can I find it?” She kept getting pointed toward different tasks and to more remote parts of the sea—farther, deeper, higher.
After many years of seeking, the fish arrived back at the place where she had first started. Entering her home waters, she encountered an older fish who asked, “What is going on with you, my friend? Why do you look so worried and dejected?”
“I’ve spent years looking for the Source of Life,” the fish explained. “I can’t even begin to tell you how many things I’ve tried or the number of places I’ve searched—all in vain. I don’t suppose you know where I could find it?”
The old fish smiled and said, “I’ve heard many names for the Source of Life in my day, but the simplest is ‘water.’”
Just like the fish, we have been searching for an amazing life source. Although this essential source is beyond our ability to accurately describe in words, we have given it many names: Truth, God, Peace, Source, Love, True Nature, Enlightenment, Unity, or Spirit, but the simplest name is awareness. Like the fish, we may have looked high and low, inside and outside, for this source of life and freedom. But what if that which we seek is closer than our own breath? What if the source of life already surrounds and permeates us?
Meeting thousands of people from many cultures and all walks of life, I’ve found that most have tasted the “water of life.” Many have glimpsed the depth and essential quality of our being: an experience of peace and love, free from our limited mind. Like the fish, we long to find and live from that level of awareness, but because most of us have stumbled upon it unintentionally, we don’t know how to find it intentionally.
Awareness is the foundation of living a human life. We cannot know anything without it. Yet, although awareness is so essential, we know very little about it. Mostly we take it for granted and focus on content: things we are aware of rather than awareness itself. The awareness we seek is right here, right now, and equally available to each of us. Similar to functions of the autonomic nervous system such as breathing, awake awareness is already happening by itself. However, awareness usually remains elusive because we don’t know how to recognize it. Awareness is not something we need to create or develop. We will need to find a way to discover, uncover, or recover this awareness. Discovering awareness involves as much unlearning as learning, but I’m convinced there is a way for each of us to shift into awareness, feel the freedom it offers, and learn to live from here. You can glimpse this freedom of awareness and shift into it as easily as you can now shift from being aware of reading to being aware of the sensations in your right hand.
When our basic awareness is revealed to be the foundation of both how we know and who we are, we can call it “awake awareness.” Discovering awake awareness is key to the transformation of consciousness called awakening that leads to our ability to live from freedom, wellbeing, and loving connection. Awakening is a shift of our identity and also a shift of our way of knowing. Awake awareness is the essence of both our ground of Being and the source of our mind. This transformation is a simple shift of awake awareness from the background of our consciousness to the foreground.
Because we’re in the habit of focusing on fast-moving thoughts and strong emotions, and of seeking happiness outside ourselves, we don’t notice awake awareness. Our current constellation of consciousness restricts our perception of our wholeness. Awakening does not begin by changing our belief system or improving our external circumstances. Awakening begins with shifting out of the way we organize our current mind and identity, which is creating ignorance and confusion. We can learn how to shift out of our thought-based mind and into an awareness-based way of knowing. Then, from awareness-based knowing, we can embody, connect, and welcome all experience. The feeling of embodied, awareness-based knowing is similar to being in a flow state, being in the zone, being in love, doing selfless service, or laughing with close friends. It is being so fully alive in the now that you “forget yourself.” Living from awareness-based knowing gives us true freedom of choice.
Awake awareness is invisible, contentless, formless, boundless, and timeless, but it is the ground of our being. When you shift out of your conventional sense of self, there is a gap of not-knowing. Awake awareness is who we are prior to the personal conditioning we usually turn to for our identity. Rather than looking to our thoughts, memories, personality, or roles to identify ourselves, we learn to know awake awareness as the primary dimension of who we are, the ground of Being. Then, with unconditioned awake awareness as the foundation of identity, we can include our conditioned thoughts, emotions, and sensations as waves of the ocean of our life. When people feel awake awareness as their primary dimension of consciousness, they report feeling an essential wellbeing that is free, loving, and safe. Awake awareness, as the ground of being, is the same in all of us, and our individuality arises out of it.
Awake awareness is sometimes called “pure awareness,” but it’s also inherent within all forms of our consciousness. At other times, the term “awakened awareness” is used, but awareness is always awake and so has not awakened. Awake awareness is always already here, and it is only a matter of learning how to directly access it. One of the most important things to learn is how to separate awareness from thinking, and then we can see that thoughts and emotions are not the center of who we are. We then discover that awareness is the source of mind that brings the peace that passes understanding. One student said, “This is what it feels like to be open-minded.” It is our natural wisdom mind, both prior to and beyond conceptual thinking. Awake awareness can “know” something without referring overtly to thoughts, but it can also use thought when needed.
When we discover the important ability to step back into awake awareness, we are no longer identified with our worried thoughts and fearful emotions. That which is aware of fear is not fearful. When awake awareness is then experienced as inherent within everything, we feel unity with all life. We begin to move from open-mindedness to open-hearted awareness, the expression of awake awareness that knows unconditional love and interconnectedness with all things. Recognition of awake awareness as the ground of Being is like “returning home” and resting as who you have always been.
Shifting into awake awareness is not like putting on rose-colored glasses; it’s more like taking away our blinders. In the open-hearted awareness approach, instead of trying to tame the wild horses of thoughts and emotions inside a too-small corral, we simply open the gates, discovering the larger field of awareness in which the thoughts can move freely. The most helpful way to be free of disturbing emotional states is not by attempting to “break” or get rid of them, but by realizing that these states are made of awareness itself. Awake awareness, as the primary source of how we know and who we are, can’t be harmed by any strong emotional state. You will discover that essential wellbeing is not found by calming our minds or by changing our thoughts or attitudes, but actually by shifting out of our chattering minds and into a freedom that is already available.
The journey of awakening is a series of shifts and small glimpses. Awake awareness can be glimpsed and directly experienced in an instant, bringing great relief. A man who helped me with my computer one day asked for an experiential pointer to awake awareness before he left. I showed him one similar to the “glimpse” practices at the end of this chapter. He emailed me back, saying, “When I came to see you, I had been anxious, overwhelmed, and stressed for weeks. All of that seemed to drop away in minutes and didn’t start up again. I probably had the best week of my life this week.” This is an example of why awake awareness is often called the “ultimate medicine.” The discovery and uncovering of awake awareness immediately opens us to natural qualities of peace, joy, love, and courage.
If awake awareness is something we’ve all experienced, and if it’s so close and accessible, why isn’t it more familiar to us? How could we have we missed it? Why haven’t we been able to access it intentionally? If awake awareness has so many benefits, why isn’t it primary on our psychological maps?
The Shangpa Kagyü Tibetan Buddhist tradition gives us a poetic response to the question of why we don’t recognize awake awareness. We don’t recognize awake awareness because it is:
So close you can’t see it
So subtle your mind can’t understand it
So simple you can’t believe it
So good you can’t accept it
We are so smart, and our lives are so complex, that it’s hard to believe that simply discovering awake awareness could be the solution to our suffering. It’s also hard to believe that the most important discovery is already here within us; we don’t have to go on an odyssey to find it, earn it, or develop it. We are so used to knowing ourselves through our troubles, our dramas, and our obsessions that awake awareness, which is our true nature and our basic goodness, is hard to accept as our true identity.
The main obstacle to relief from suffering is our current identity, what Einstein called our “optical delusion of consciousness.” Paradoxically, this same identity is trying to solve the problem of our suffering. This identity seems very real, as if it is a separate self that feels located in our heads. Both ancient wisdom and modern neuroscience now agree that there is no physical location of a separate self that can be found in the brain. Living as if there were a separate self inside your head is considered having a mistaken identity, and this is the root of suffering. We will call this mental self-referencing process ego-identification.
Shame-based core stories of being unlovable and worthless are held together by our mistaken identity, but we can be liberated from feeling worthless by shifting into awake awareness. Ego-identification is only one limited way of organizing your identity. Ego-identification is not “you” identifying with “your ego”; it is a pattern of consciousness made up of thinking and ego functions (such as seeking and protection) that form during our early biological development. Once this ego-identification pattern begins to generate the feeling that it has a physical boundary, a central seat of identity is created.
Ego-identification is not our personality, our personal history, or our ego functions. The simple confusion of ego functions (what we do) and self-awareness (the ability to think about thinking) with our identity (who we are) is at the root of this type of existential suffering. Ego-identification is a mental pattern of consciousness that creates the feeling of a “mini-me” inside our heads. It doesn’t have to be fought, repressed, extinguished, denied, or killed. We don’t become a nobody, an angel, or a couch potato. Instead, when we discover awake awareness as our true nature, our ego functions can return to their natural roles and semi-retire from their second job as identity.
One woman said her life had transformed because of these practices. “The panic attacks I had are gone,” she said. “I laugh more, and mostly at myself!” She brought her husband to an introductory class I was teaching, and he sat at the back of the room with his arms crossed, looking half-asleep during my initial talk. After the second experiential exercise, when I asked everyone what the shift into awake awareness revealed, he suddenly brightened and said, “It’s me! The real me I haven’t felt since childhood.”
When we shift out of ego-identification and subsequently know awake awareness as our true ground of being, we feel that there’s nothing we need to gain or get rid of in order to feel okay on the level of identity. We will not discover freedom and love by restricting our physical needs; by creating a stronger, calmer, more focused mind; or by trying to create security and success in the world. Moving pieces on the chessboard of our minds will not clear up our confusion or end our suffering. For that, we need to shift out of ego-identification and into awake awareness.
By deconstructing, or shifting out of ego-identification, we won’t necessarily discover awake awareness. We can end up being spaced out, blissed-in, or lost in our unconscious mind. We can even become caught in meditation states such as being “comfortably numb” or in a detached “witness-protection program.” It is not enough to have an insight into the absence of a separate self. We must also discover the presence of awareness-based knowing so that we can live from here.
Awake awareness might seem like a new experience; however, it’s not an altered state, a transcendent state, or even a meditative state. It’s our innate, true nature that is always here. When we have shifted into awake awareness, we realize that ego-identification is actually the altered state. By recognizing awake awareness, we are dehypnotizing ourselves from the trance of ego-identification.
HAVE WE MET BEFORE?
Many of us have unwittingly glimpsed awake awareness throughout our lives. In fact, we often seek its enjoyable qualities without realizing that awake awareness is their source. From our current level of mind we cannot experience our ground of Being, deep wisdom or open-hearted awareness. Although we may not have known it, whenever we experienced love and wisdom, it has always been because we shifted levels of mind.
Many of us have unknowingly dropped into awake awareness while walking in nature, being creative, making love, or playing sports; some of us have experienced it through crisis that became opportunity. Although activities like nature walks are pleasurable in themselves, they also relax the dominance of ego-identification, allowing awake awareness to emerge from the background.
When we go hiking and get to the top of a hill, our seeking to reach a goal stops. We relax fully, and our identity as the seeker drops away, revealing the awake awareness that was naturally there all along. At times like these, natural qualities of awake awareness show up—among them clarity, boundless freedom, peace of mind, joy, connection, and a sense of wellbeing. Because we don’t know that the source of our joy and freedom is already within us, we might say later, “I feel miserable these days. I’ll just have to wait until I can go back to the top of that hill again next year.”
There is an old wisdom saying: “Silence is not the absence of sound but the absence of self.”2 In other words, we don’t need to go to a physically quiet place. We can experience both the deep stillness and the dancing aliveness that arise simultaneously. Silence and stillness are here now within you as you are reading this book. Awake awareness and its natural qualities are not connected to any specific place, person, or activity—nor is awake awareness dependent on any internal thoughts or external conditions. If we try to re-create our experience by going back up that hill, our expectant state may keep us from letting go of the seeking mind long enough to allow awake awareness to be revealed again.
Many of us have tried to find awake awareness. We’ve tried to earn it through good deeds, achieve it through meditation, or pray that it will be granted. Some believe that it is available only to the highly evolved. Others believe it only appears through luck or a kind of grace that is either given to us or absent from our lives. When the obscuration of ego-identification dissolves, it can seem as if grace or awake awareness had been absent and then newly arrives from somewhere else. What if awake awareness is not earned by good deeds or given only to a fortunate few? What if awake awareness is not missing and does not come and go? What if awake awareness is always already here, inherent within each of us? We can learn to become grace prone by becoming familiar with opening to the grace that’s always here within and around us.
Many people get caught in the trap of focusing only on manifestations of the invisible awareness. These kinds of manifestations include light, energy, rapture, bliss, external success, charisma, an inner voice, visions, or stillness. These manifestations are real, but they are only transitional meditation effects. They are not awake awareness itself. Positive energetic expressions can be preliminary stepping-stones or doorways to awake awareness.
We can also get caught up in focusing on positive manifestations in the world as our goal. But if we don’t recognize awake awareness as the unmanifest source of all manifestations, the positive manifestations can seduce us into believing external things that come and go are the source of our happiness. When we are happy without a cause, we are free to make choices that benefit ourselves and others.
Many who have longed and strived to know awake awareness have missed it, not because they lacked desire or commitment, but because they didn’t know where to look or what to look with. One reason we can’t find it, see it, or understand it is because awake awareness is not an “it.” Awake awareness is not an object or thing that can be seen, heard, touched, smelled, or tasted. It isn’t a thought, an emotion, image, belief, sensation, or even energy. The Zen tradition says, “To seek Mind with the discriminating mind is the greatest of all mistakes.”3 Neither the five senses, the thinking mind, the ego, the will, the imagination, nor attention can know awake awareness. Just as the eye cannot hear sounds, thinking and attention cannot know awake awareness. The one who is reading these words and trying to experience awake awareness cannot do so until you let go of the way of knowing that you use in other areas of life. Only awake awareness can know awake awareness.
One of the main reasons we don’t awaken is because we have not yet solved this paradox of how only awareness can know awareness. The question arises: If we are not operating from awareness now, how do we access the awareness that can know awake awareness?
The most common answer is to sit in meditation for long periods of time so the chattering mind will settle and eventually allow awake awareness to be revealed. This usually requires a full-time commitment. However, with the discovery of local awareness, we can immediately access awake awareness in any place at any time. Local awareness is the expression of awake awareness that can unhook from thinking and know itself. Although you may not understand what local awareness is or how to find it, once you are introduced to local awareness in the glimpse practices at the end of this chapter, you will discover that using it is as easy as tying your shoes.
The open-hearted awareness approach first introduces you to local awareness, and then local awareness will introduce you to all levels of mind and locations of identity. Then you can begin to navigate through your own consciousness and become able to live from fully embodied, open-hearted awareness. Local awareness, the primary tool of the open-hearted awareness approach, is the mode or expression of awake awareness that is able to move to different levels of mind.
Normally, local awareness is obscured by our faster-moving thoughts and stronger emotions. However, we find that local awareness can easily detach from thinking and shift into awake awareness, which is then our new ground of being. This process of local awareness detaching from thought and then joining awake awareness is called unhooking and recognizing. We learn a simple set of practices for unhooking local awareness from ego-identification and using it to directly recognize awake awareness. Local awareness is able to know awareness that is already effortlessly awake because it is never separate from it. As soon as we are looking from awake awareness, we have shifted into an awareness-based operating system from which we can live.
Local awareness is like a radio tuner or TV remote that can intentionally shift us to different bandwidths of consciousness. Local awareness can tune away from the narrow, mental, ego-identified station that is the everyday mind and tune in to the station of the body’s senses. Local awareness can also tune in to spacious awareness, the expression of awake awareness that is unconditioned, boundless, pure awareness.
Your mind is like a TV or radio with lots of stations playing all at once. Many of us are tuned in to the Thinking Channel all day long, and most of these programs are talk shows. We don’t realize that there is a tuner that will allow us to change the channel. However, when we learn to use local awareness, then talk shows on the Thinking Channel no longer need to be our regularly scheduled programs. There are other dimensions of mind and identity that are always available and can be accessed with local awareness.
There’s initial relief when we’re able to tune away from the Thinking Channel, but if we don’t know what to tune in to next, we may land on Negative-Mood Music Channel or the Unconscious Nightmare Station. Some people might subscribe to the Too-Serious Satellite Channel or You’re No Good FM or the Fear-and-Worry News Network. In fact, we might become identified with one voice in our heads and believe this single, small bandwidth is who we are. This loud I-AM radio station is preset to override the other band-widths of our lives.
You might be seeing old episodes from your early life playing in your mind’s eye. Whether these are soap operas or horror shows, you’re likely seeing them from the point of view of a character inside the story rather than that of an outside viewer. It’s easy to get involved with chase scenes, revenge plotlines, or romantic tragedies if you don’t know that they’re only recordings being played over and over again. We think these regularly scheduled programs are the place to look for solutions to our dissatisfaction with our lives, so we channel-surf through them constantly. But reruns, reality shows, or game shows that offer cash and prizes are the wrong place to find satisfaction.
We can shift out of being located in ego-identification, which is looking through our eyes as if the world is virtual reality or reality TV. Fortunately, with local awareness, we can learn to intentionally tune away from chattering bandwidths and tune in to the silent music of the awake awareness that is always in the background. When we shift into awake awareness and awake awareness is embodied, we are in real contact with the world and ourselves.
Moving from glimpsing awake awareness to knowing and living from awake awareness is called awakening. Awakening is not about simply believing that all is well; it’s about shifting into the level of mind that knows and feels all is well. We cannot understand awakening if we consider only behavior, thinking, and psychology. To understand awakening, we need to look at the level of experience of consciousness and awareness. This may be new, but it’s not difficult once you learn the basics of how to look, where to look, and what to look for. Intellectually understanding awakening is like having a strand of Christmas lights; directly experiencing awakening is like plugging them in.
Even though we are already home, we don’t know it—so we need to learn to return. We begin by glimpsing the end goal. The goal is our path. There’s a Tibetan Dzogchen saying that the journey of awakening is like climbing up a mountain while simultaneously swooping down from above. We’re getting here while being here. Here is the paradox of being home while returning home: 1) Ultimately, you are already home in awake awareness, and all is well as it is. 2) However, usually we do not experience this from our everyday mind. 3) Awake awareness is like the sun: it’s never gone, only covered by clouds. 4) Not knowing that we are home is the cause of suffering. 5) We can shift out of our thought-based, everyday mind and return home to awake awareness. 6) On the level of identity there is nothing to be improved. 7) On the level of mind we can glimpse awake awareness and then know and live from awake awareness.
Awakening will let you know that you are not who you think you are and will introduce you to your true nature. In order to live from a new view, we must first let go of the old. What feels like leaving home, with the fear of homelessness, is eventually discovered to be returning to the home you never left.
THE PROCESS OF AWAKENING
Awakening is possible for you. It may sound like a big, esoteric thing—especially when you are having a bad day. We are all imperfect. That is not going to change, but neither is the fact that we can realize who we are is already unconditional love itself. Today there is a potential for a new stage of human development that combines awakening and growing up. It’s clear you can only grow up to a certain level unless you awaken, and it’s also important to mature psychologically while awakening. No matter how advanced we get spiritually, the goal is not to transcend being human.
In order to awaken, you don’t have to leave your life, go to a cave, become an Olympic-level meditator, or take on any set of religious beliefs. Regardless of your belief system or your spiritual affiliation (or nonaffiliation), you can begin awakening in the midst of your daily life. You don’t even have to wait until you’ve gotten your life together. In fact, if you’re looking from ego-identification, you’ll never feel good enough or prepared enough. Most adults are ready. Chances are if you’re reading this book, you’re ready. If you’ve had practice concentrating, completing tasks in school and at work, and forming relationships, you’ve grown up enough to wake up and learn to live from open-hearted awareness.
Awakening is about relieving suffering and increasing wellbeing through a shift of identity and knowing. We all have frustrations and sufferings at all levels of our physical, mental, and emotional life. There are different ways to approach these problems. However, the suffering addressed in awakening is a very particular type of suffering—a pervasive confusion and a perpetual dissatisfaction caused by ego-identification. Awakening addresses the root cause—not just the symptoms of craving and aversion. Although physical and emotional pain are legitimate suffering and normal parts of human life, suffering from our mistaken identity is optional.
In this approach, awakening begins with a direct recognition but then has a gradual unfolding. It is not instant enlightenment or an escape from the human condition. Ultimately, who you are is always awake awareness—and yet realizing this begins an unfolding into human form. Just glimpsing your basic nature can be a profound shift in itself.
The awakening process often begins with an initial waking-up from ego-identification and into awake awareness. Then it continues with waking-in to include and know our body, thoughts, and emotions from nonconceptual knowing and abiding. The third stage, waking-out, involves creating and relating from open-hearted awareness. Each stage brings its own liberation. Waking-up leads to freedom from the fear of death. Waking-in leads to freedom from the fear of life. And waking-out leads to freedom from the fear of love.
Waking-up, the initial stage of awakening, can be divided into two important movements. The first of these is waking-up out of ego-identification, the normal way of organizing our identity that creates suffering. The second is waking-up into awake awareness as an alternative to our mistaken identity, and recognizing that awareness is already awake and intelligent. Realizing that we can shift out of ego-identification and into awake awareness is as revolutionary today as the recognition that the Earth revolves around the sun was in the seventeenth century.
In many wisdom traditions, the term awakening is often used because people report that their experience resembles waking from a dream. We are currently in an altered, dreamlike state, which creates suffering and confusion that disappear when we awaken. When we’re dreaming at night, we are fully identified with the dream world and experience it as real and complete. But as soon as we wake up, we know for sure: “Oh, that was only a dream!”
When we come out of a dream, the entire dream world disappears. When we wake up out of ego-identification, our fearful and craving thoughts and projections disappear, leaving the physical world simpler and clearer. When we wake from a dream, we realize that whoever we mistook ourselves to be in the dream isn’t who we really are. Our ego-identification’s dreamlike perception disappears, and we stop sleepwalking through our lives. When we awaken and are grounded in awareness, our ego-identification is no longer the center of who we are. We may feel as if there had been a dream figure with our name that was trying to live our life.
Upon waking-up out of ego-identification, we may be surprised to discover that our limited perspective is only a small part of a much vaster reality. Awakening is like coming out of a movie theater after an engrossing drama. What seemed to be a real danger to the “mini-me” of ego-identification before, we now see as a story. When we awaken, we’re no longer worried and scared about imaginary situations that had once seemed so troubling. We realize that we are the vast consciousness that has been acting out a small part.
Most of us assume that our ego-identification is who we are, and so we live our lives from its viewpoint. We think that our best opportunity for a safe, sane life is to strengthen this ego-identity. Looking from the lens of ego-identification, the subtler dimensions of reality are blurry, and we feel distinctly separate from everything. Awakening is the shift into the direct experience of a fuller reality that had previously been obscured by ignorance and delusion.
If we just wake up by deconstructing or transcending the mini-me, we can end up in a gap that feels like negative emptiness. This can seem like a scary transition, and there can be a rebound effect that sends us back to the mini-me. There is naturally a magnetic pull of habit to have consciousness reconstitute by identifying with thought-based knowing. We may feel like our thinking mind is our home. For many of us, in fact, it’s the only home we know. We also may have learned to tell ourselves, “Don’t go out of your mind,” or, “Avoid the void.” As soon as we return to our thinking mind for a second opinion, we reidentify with our contracted sense of self. By immediately recognizing awake awareness, we discover a positive emptiness that is not just an absence but a living presence, an open mind, a safe space, our new ground of being. We can only know who we truly are from awake awareness—based knowing. We can then welcome the fear of negative emptiness as a feeling.
As we wake in, we feel grounded, centered, and more in our bodies. As we wake out, we feel more creative and connected to others than ever before. Most of us have spent much of our lives working on the project of improving and developing our separate sense of self in order to succeed, win approval, and find happiness. We must have the willingness to go through the gap of not knowing, non-ego, and not being in control. By recognizing awake awareness immediately, we have the support to begin our new phase of life. Awakening may seem like a daunting challenge, but it’s not any more difficult than other stages of learning and growth you’ve already been through, and it’s more rewarding. In fact, in order for our awakening to be embodied, we need to show up and include all aspects of human growth, relationships, and development.
Awakening begins by discovering the awareness that is already free, awake, and connected, regardless of whether our thoughts are positive or negative. Awakening is not a one-time event, but a series of shifts and a process of unfolding that moves us away from the habit of trying to maintain a center, a point of view, and the primacy of a separate sense of self. The process of awakening and embodying has common principles, but it unfolds uniquely for each individual. We can begin our process by having small glimpses of awake awareness and repeating these glimpses many times.
The practice of small glimpses will begin to rewire our whole operating system and further support the unfolding process of awakening. Our entire mind-body system has been tied in knots by our attempts to defend against the pain caused by our mistaken identity. For this reason, most of us go through a process of thawing out, detoxing, and gradually rewiring our neural networks. The journey of awakening welcomes and liberates our deepest doubts and fears. The core stories—I’m not good enough . . . Something’s wrong with me . . . I’m unlovable—are no longer convincing. We learn to return to awake awareness as our ground of being, and we train to remain in it. The shift to a new perception, knowing, and identity generates a new kind of vitality. As a result, we discover a renewed level of motivation and creative expression.
You have to begin where you are, but the one who starts the journey is not the one who awakens. “You” do not awaken, and awareness does not awaken. Awake awareness, which is contentless and unconditioned, realizes that it has always been awake and is the primary foundation of your conditioning and human life. Many people call this realization, or remembering who we truly are. One person said: “This is the feeling of who I’ve been at all ages in my life, which hasn’t changed.” It is so ordinary that it is extraordinary. When you awaken, you awaken from a looping thought pattern that has been called “me” and feels located behind your eyes, in the middle of your head. But awakening doesn’t make you become a nobody, a bliss-ninny, or a vacant robot. You are simply not the particular identity that you formerly took yourself to be. This journey starts with freedom from identification with our bodies and minds, but it ends up including and embracing everything from open-hearted awareness.
It may be hard for you to accept that shifting into freedom is really possible for you. But the natural, loving awareness that I am talking about is the source of your mind and identity. It is our natural condition; we can glimpse it at any moment, and it is the potential new operating system to which we can upgrade. Once we discover open-hearted awareness, we no longer have to live in the office cubicle of our head. Instead, we can stay at home in our heart and be connected to the information we need in our brain through open-hearted awareness Wi-Fi.
I suggest you do your first glimpse practice early in the day for five to twenty minutes. Once you’ve shifted into a new, stable ground of Being, you are done and ready to enjoy the day. One way to do this is to begin your glimpse practice first thing upon waking in the morning, while still in bed. Another way is to find a place to sit that feels comfortable and, with your eyes open or closed, settle in to do a glimpse practice that works for you. It is important to alternate and integrate sitting practice with glimpsing a number of times throughout your day. By doing this, you become able to unhook local awareness, shift, recognize, tune in, familiarize, marinate, and then see and do from Being.
When the habit of ego-identification arises, which is no big surprise, simply do a small glimpse practice and re-recognize your true nature. You can do the same one or try different ones, as you are learning how to navigate the territory of your own consciousness. Experiment and discover which glimpse practices work best in different situations.
The glimpse practices are designed to be read or listened to until you familiarize yourself with them enough to do them on your own during a break at work or while standing in line at a store. It can be difficult to do the practice while reading it, so you can either record your own voice speaking the practice or you can find video or audio versions of me guiding these practices online.
GLIMPSE 1 No Problem
This exercise is a direct pointer for shifting out of ego-identification and into awake awareness as your ground of Being. Most people feel a sense of underlying dissatisfaction that leads to craving and aversion, which is created by ego-identification. From ego-identification, we then try to solve the problem of mistaken identity by changing things in our personality or our environment. This creation of a problem-solver identity is what binds us and blinds us to the freedom that’s already here. It creates a frantic continual search, like looking for your glasses when they’re on your head.
In this practice, you’ll discover that you can shift out of your mistaken identity in a moment. The goal is not to escape the normal issues and choices in your daily life, but to shift out of the mistaken problem-solver identity. When you make that shift and discover awake awareness as the ground of Being, you’ll have fewer troubles and can more easily solve daily challenges.
1. When you’re ready, put the book down and, with open or closed eyes, say this question to yourself internally: What is here now if there is no problem to solve?
2. Rest and remain alert to who or what is experiencing.
3. Who is here? What is aware? What is here when there is nowhere to go and nothing to do? Nothing to know or create or become? What is here, just now, when you are not the problem solver?
4. Feel into whatever shows up here and now. Who or what is aware? What is here when there is no referencing the past, no going one moment into the future, when you’re not settling into sleep and not going up to thought? What’s here now? What’s it like when there’s no problem to solve just now? What do you notice? What is absent? What essential qualities are revealed?
5. Again put your reading down. Take a breath and pause. Then ask with a beginner’s mind and curiosity: What is here now if there is no problem to solve?
GLIMPSE 2 Awake Awareness Is Aware without Using Thought
The everyday mind needs an object to remain central. When awareness looks to space, we are free of the everyday mind. Ego-identification needs to look to thought, and from thought, to create a subject. When awareness makes awareness its subject and object, there is no longer a subject (self) that is made of thoughts. Awake awareness has become the primary way of knowing and the ground of Being.
1. Simply close your eyes while allowing your awareness to remain open and be within. Begin to feel your breath from within your body. Feel your whole body from within while breathing is happening by itself for three breaths.
2. Take a moment to see what is here now. Notice how your body is feeling. Is it uncomfortable, comfortable, agitated, relaxed, tired, or neutral? Just let your body be as it is without changing anything.
3. Now simply notice the awareness that is already accepting your body as it is. Feel the awareness in which these sensations are happening.
4. Become interested in activity of your mind and thoughts. Just be aware of whether your thoughts are agitated, calm, tired, emotional, anxious, or neutral. Without changing anything, allow your mind and thoughts to be as they are.
5. Now notice the space in which thoughts are moving. Be interested in the awareness instead of the thoughts. Notice how awareness allows your mind to be as it is without changing anything.
6. Begin to notice that awake awareness is alert, clear, and nonjudgmental. See also that awareness is not tired, anxious, or in pain. Notice that awake awareness is all around and inherent within your body and within your mind. Instead of being identified with the states of your body or mind or trying to accept or change them, simply become interested in what is aware and accepting.
7. What is awareness like that is already accepting of things as they are—right here and now? Notice the awareness of the next sound you hear. Does awareness have a location or size? What is it like to be aware of experiences from this pain- and thought-free awareness?
8. Now simply be aware of the awareness that is free from the contents of your mind and the sensations in your body. Hang out as awareness without going up to thought or down to sleep. Be the awareness that welcomes your sensations and thoughts. Notice that awareness is not separate from thoughts, feelings, and sensations.
9. Just let go of focusing on any one thing. See everything without particularizing. Rest as the awareness that is aware without using thought. Can you see how no thought or feeling is solid? Can you see that awareness does not come and go?
10. Simply let be and remain uncontracted and undistracted without effort.
GLIMPSE 3 Mind, the Gap
This glimpse, “Mind, the Gap,” is about finding awake awareness in the gap between thoughts. You may know a meditation practice where you repeat a word or a sacred phrase, known as a mantra. Here, you’ll focus not on the word or its meaning but on the space—and awareness—between words. The intention is to give the thinking mind the simple task of repeating a word to occupy it while you become aware of the gap between your thoughts. As you explore the presence of awareness in space, you may begin to notice that the space between and around the words is the same continuous field of awareness that you are aware from.
1. Begin by silently and slowly repeating in your mind, “Blah,” with some space in between. “Blah . . . blah . . . blah.” Allow the word “blah” to float through the space of your mind like a feather. Don’t create any other thoughts or be interested in any thoughts that arise. Let “blah” occupy all the interest and activity of thinking.
2. Begin to be aware of the thought-free space between the words, “blah” . . . space . . . “blah.”
3. Next, become more interested in the quality of the space between the words. See if you notice that the space is not just a gap, but that the space itself is aware. “Blah” . . . aware space . . . “blah” . . . aware space . . . “blah” . . . aware space.
4. Feel the spacious awareness in between the words and all around them as a field of awake awareness in which the word “blah” and other thoughts now appear. Feel your mind not as a solid thing but as clear, open, and aware.
5. Feel and be awareness that is awake and alert without needing to go to thought for a second opinion. Be aware of the feeling of thought-free, alert clarity. Notice the ease and natural welcoming of all experiences that arise.
While doing this practice, you may have noticed that there are two kinds of space. One is the physical space in the room—the absence of objects and content. The other space is presence that is aware and awake. What you’ve just experienced shows that you can be aware, knowing, and intelligent—without relying on thinking. Whether there are thoughts or no thoughts on the screen of your mind, there is a background knowing that can move to the foreground and then become the ground of your Being. This silent, spacious awareness doesn’t use thought to look to other thoughts to confirm that you know what you know.