DIRECT RECOGNITION, GRADUAL UNFOLDING
Realization involves a process called recognizing, training, and attaining stability. It’s similar to planting the seed of a flower. You plant it, nurture it, and finally it grows up and blossoms.
TULKU URGYEN RINPOCHE1
When I was a young kid, school was hard for me. I knew I was smart, but I couldn’t get what I knew in my mind onto the written page. I had a hard time focusing and keeping things in order. Although I didn’t know it at the time, I had some form of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and dyslexia. In fifth grade, I studied hard for a spelling test, telling myself: “Remember the word ‘Europe’ begins with E-u and ends with p-e.” When I got my test back, I couldn’t understand why I had gotten it wrong. My friend Tim, looking over my shoulder, laughed out loud and said, “You wrote Eupe.”
As a kid, I loved playing sports. You name it, I loved it—from neighborhood tag and catch with friends to playing on organized teams. I could stay focused, calm, and connected with others while engaged in sports. In high school, I was the goalie for the ice hockey team. During my sophomore year, I played particularly well during one game and helped my team shut out the opposing team.
In the locker room after the game, my good friend Bruce sat down next to me. “Man, you made some amazing saves,” he said. “How did you do that?”
“Well, if you really want to know . . .” I hesitated, wondering whether I dared describe my experience out loud, or if I could even put it into words. “I do this thing I call ‘eyes in the back of my head,’” I began. “I open my peripheral vision to the sides of my head, and then I let it keep going—all the way around to the back of my head. Then an amazing change happens: Time slows down. I feel open and connected to everything around me. It gets real quiet inside me, and outside seems strangely quiet too. I feel like a cat: calm, alert, and ready to move when necessary. Instead of my eyes staring at one thing, all of my senses seem wide open, and I feel plugged into everything.”
I was excited to be explaining this out loud to someone else, rather than mulling it over by myself. “It’s like this,” I continued with enthusiasm. “A guy hits a slap shot from the blue line, and I see the puck travel in a line for the first foot or two. But then I lose sight of it in the scramble of legs and sticks. After that, without thinking about it, my hand naturally shoots out, and the puck lands in my glove.”
Bruce gave me a blank stare. “Oh, that’s cool,” he finally said before walking away.
The captain of the team, a senior, must have overheard me, because he came up after the next game and handed me a copy of Zen in the Art of Archery. “Here, kid,” he said. “Read this. It’s just what you were talking about last week.”
I went home and read the whole short book that night. It blew me away that others had experiences similar to my own. Although I didn’t understand everything in the book, I was amazed at the similarities between the Zen approach to archery and my own experience playing sports. The author wrote, “In the case of archery, the hitter and the hit are no longer two opposing objects, but are one reality.”2 Not only does the Zen method help you improve your skill, it also turns a sport into the training ground for a new way of living based on an effortlessly aware flow state.
The book went on to say that this kind of Zen practice brings with it the feeling of being “completely empty and rid of the self.”3 This phrase felt strangely familiar, but curious. When I opened my awareness and let go of thinking about what I was doing, I became more alert, relaxed, and successful. I felt emptied of one sense of self, and yet more like my true self. I knew exactly what was going on, but I wasn’t thinking! Thoughts like “Am I making a mistake?” or “Try harder!” were absent. I wanted to know more about how to experience this way of being more often. It seemed so important that I wondered why we didn’t study this in school. I eventually ended up going to graduate school in psychology and comparative religions, though I didn’t find what I was looking for in the classroom.
One year during graduate school, I had a lingering cold, and a fellow student suggested I visit Dr. Chan, who’d been a physician in China before escaping during the Cultural Revolution. Dr. Chan lived and worked out of a fourth-floor walkup in New York City’s Chinatown. After examining me, he mixed a bag of herbs, leaves, and sticks for a tea that I would take home. Dr. Chan was interested when I told him I was studying comparative spirituality and psychology.
“Do you want to treat the cold and the root cause of suffering?” he asked me, and laughed.
“The root cause of the cold?” I responded, uncertain I’d understood him.
“Yes, that,” he agreed, and then clarified, “but also the root cause of suffering.”
I told him I was interested.
Along with the bag of herbs, he gave me a Taoist book, The Secret of the Golden Flower. “Take this tea every morning and evening,” he instructed. “Read this book each day until you finish, and come back in one week.”
When I returned the next week, I was feeling better. That day, Dr. Chan taught me how to do a practice from The Secret of the Golden Flower called “turning the light of awareness around.” He explained that in China this practice is often confused with a circulation-of-energy practice. Dr. Chan appreciated energy-circulating practices, but he emphasized that these practices were not the same as turning around awareness.
I recorded what he said in my diary: “Awareness is prior to energy, and awareness is within energy. First we see what awareness is and then what awareness knows.”
Although I didn’t really understand exactly what I was supposed to do when Dr. Chan gave the first pointing-out instruction, I gave it a try anyway. My awareness seemed to go out into the room, then turn around to look back through my mind and thoughts. Awareness moved through what I felt was “me”—or at least through the “me” that previously seemed to be located in my head. The result was an immediate experience of freedom from my small sense of self and a boundless awareness from which I was now looking. I felt such clarity, love, and connection that I actually laughed out loud. This wasn’t a calm meditation state; it was a simple, alert, joyful, loving, and wise innocence—and it was happening by itself. I also felt sweet sadness, as though I were reuniting with a loved one upon returning home. Tears of joy began to well up in my eyes at the intimacy and beauty of everything.
I told Dr. Chan about my childhood experience of “eyes in the back of my head.” That made him happy. He explained how this was one of the simplest, but most precious ancient teachings. Dr. Chan felt these teachings should be shared with everyone. He added that the word “transmission” had been misunderstood to mean the special energy or powers of a tradition or teacher. He talked about institutions and gurus who tried to keep secret these simple, ancient teachings or who confused these practices with energy (chi or prana), calm meditation, or intellectual beliefs. Energy could be transmitted from person to person, but the light of awareness is already equally inherent within everyone and therefore cannot travel from one person to another. All a teacher can do is offer others pointing instructions. The student must find awareness within himself or herself; it was even possible to stumble upon awareness without a teacher or tradition.
After I left Dr. Chan’s office that day, the foundation of awake awareness effortlessly maintained itself through the night and into the next afternoon before the old way of being “me” began to return. That glimpse of my true nature was so simple that it inspired me with confidence. The unique thing was that awake awareness could be accessed intentionally and immediately. Once I learned how to make the simple movement of awareness, I was able to repeat the shift to awake awareness on my own.
The next year, I went on a traveling fellowship. I studied insight meditation in Sri Lanka, then studied with teachers in India. I ended up in Nepal, where I met Tibetan Buddhist teacher Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche. He gave simple, yet profound pointing-out instructions freely to anyone at retreats, and even during public talks.
In the Tibetan Buddhist Dzogchen and Mahamudra traditions, rigpa or “awake awareness” is the empty, yet active, awareness–based operating system from which we can learn how to live. Currently, we are living from a thought-based operating system, called sem. Sem creates confusion that leads to dualistic perception. Pointing-out instructions are often called an “introduction to awareness.” Pointing-out instructions are hints on how and where to look for awake awareness as the source of your mind. Pointing-out instructions are pragmatic, simple ways of seeing through our mistaken identity by having our mind look at our mind, having awareness look at awareness.
I was particularly drawn to the Sutra Mahamudra style of Buddhism, which offers access to awake awareness and the ability to live from it in the midst of daily life. Early practitioners of Mahamudra were neither Tibetan nor monastic; they were a diverse group of men and women from India—artists, salespeople, healers, family members, politicians, nobility, and outcasts—all engaged in the world in a non-sectarian, nonrenunciated, nonelitist, noninstitutional, nonritualistic, and nondual way.
Sam Harris, a neuroscientist and author of Waking Up, who also studied with Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, writes about how valuable this learning experience was for him: “Tulku Urgyen simply handed me the ability to cut through the illusion of the self directly, even in ordinary states of consciousness. This instruction was, without question, the most important thing I have ever been explicitly taught by another human being. It has given me a way to escape the usual tides of psychological suffering—fear, anger, shame—in an instant.”4
In some traditions, there is a distinction made between gradual awakening and sudden awakening. Paradoxically, the open-hearted awareness approach is neither of these and both of these. Even in traditions that emphasize a gradual approach to awakening, there is an acknowledgment that the direct approach can be easier for some people. The Attention Revolution, by B. Alan Wallace, PhD, outlines ten stages of progressive meditation training from the Tibetan tradition. The first four stages develop one-pointed focus and train toward a mindful witness. Stages five through seven are called “settling the mind in its natural state,” which means a resting and letting-be practice similar to the Zen approach of just sitting.5 Wallace writes, “From the eighth stage onward, we move on to the still subtler practice of maintaining awareness of awareness itself.” The practice of awareness of awareness “may be optimal from the beginning for those who are strongly drawn to it.”6
Open-hearted awareness begins with awareness of awareness. It is an essence approach, also called the direct approach. The word essence comes from the Latin root esse, meaning “to be,” but it doesn’t imply that there’s an unchanging substance at our core. Instead of doing, thinking, or believing, we begin by discovering our essential nature—and then we are able to act from there. Direct refers to the ability to access our essential nature immediately, knowing it’s already fully here and doesn’t need to be created or developed.
Some form of essence approach appears in most traditions and cultures around the world, including Christian mysticism, Sufism, Judaic Kabbalah, Zen Buddhism, Tibetan Dzogchen and Mahamudra, Chinese Taoism, Tantric yoga, Advaita Vedanta, and shamanism. It also seems important to acknowledge that throughout history, people have reported spontaneous awakenings outside of any religious or spiritual tradition.
Nineteenth-century poet Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote about his own experience with inquiry, as discovered during his childhood: “This has come upon me through repeating my own name to myself silently, till all at once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this was not a confused state but the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words—where death was an almost laughable impossibility—the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction, but the only true life.”7
Direct recognition is a kind of remembering, not a literal recollection of information, memories, or facts, but a deeper uncovering of our true nature. In Greek, the word for truth is alethia, and its opposite is lethe, which means “forgetfulness” or “oblivion.” In Greek myths, if you drink the water of the River Lethe—which flows through Hades’s underworld—you forget who you are and remain there, lost and wandering. Truth means remembering. The experience of direct recognition is like waking up from sleepwalking: it reveals who you have always been.
The open-hearted awareness approach focuses on uncovering or discovering our essential nature and then shifting our level of mind to live from open-hearted awareness. Because awake awareness is already here, there is no need to strive to earn it, create it, or develop it; nor is it effective to adopt the passive attitude of waiting for it to find us. Awake awareness, the ground of being, is equally available within each of us, as our essence. However, simply believing this—or intellectually understanding it—is not enough.
One new student lamented, “I don’t get it; this is too intellectual for me!” I replied, “It may be hard to grasp because you don’t need to use your intellect at all; it’s not known through our usual, conceptual way of knowing.” This approach is not intellectual, conceptual, or linear, so it may seem unusual, paradoxical, or initially hard to grasp. When this student directly glimpsed awake awareness, she remarked, “Now I see! This isn’t too intellectual. It’s so simple. How could I have missed it?”
Awakening means thought-based knowing no longer dominates our perception. We are shifting into an awareness-based way of knowing and being. There may a period of disorientation before we become reoriented at our new level of mind. We begin by glimpsing the end goal, which is already here. Rather than doing any technique to calm our chattering mind, we start with a direct glimpse of awake awareness, which is already calm, intelligent, loving, and inclusive.
The open-hearted awareness approach begins with methods designed to bring about a direct recognition of awake awareness. After direct recognition, there is a gradual unfolding as we reintegrate our emotions, thoughts, and ordinary functioning from awake awareness. The Mahamudra tradition has practices for yoking and mixing absolute awareness with our conventional physical life.
Awakening through this approach begins with encountering the selflessness of awareness. This initial direct recognition of awake awareness begins a process that continues with a gradual unfolding. Some traditions emphasize the need for preliminary practices as preparation for introducing awareness of awareness so that we won’t minimize the recognition and return to the sleep of ignorance. The training of modern life brings emotional development as well as skills of concentration and discipline. People with and without an existing meditation practice are equally capable of beginning with awareness of awareness if they’re motivated. In the open-hearted awareness approach, the emphasis is on post-recognition teachings and cultivating the process of unfolding.
One way to understand the process of direct recognition and gradual unfolding is to break it into stages: recognition, realization, stabilization, and expression. Recognition is our first glimpse of awake awareness. Realization is an identity shift, when we come to understand that we’re looking from awake awareness, which has become our ground of being. Stabilization begins when awake awareness is our primary way of knowing. Expression occurs when we have discovered open-hearted awareness and rewired our brains to create and relate from here.
The open-hearted awareness approach goes directly to the root of our suffering and reveals the absence of self and the presence of natural, positive qualities. The shift into awake awareness is a shift into a whole new way of knowing and being. With the initial shift away from the everyday mind comes a not-knowing. With the first taste of not-knowing, there’s tremendous freedom from controlling, resisting, judging, and checking in with thinking every moment. But not-knowing isn’t the culmination of the process. Not-knowing is the gap or bridge that leads to a new way of knowing that’s very different, a kind of not-knowing-that-knows.
The not-knowing is freedom from ego-identification, while the not-knowing-that-knows is perhaps the most important element for stabilization and expression. Learning how to shift into awake awareness is not an intellectual or conceptual learning process. You can only truly know awake awareness when you’ve shifted into it and know from it.
The most important thing is not just the initial pointing-out of awake awareness but to “train to remain.” We start the process with recognizing selflessness and not-knowing, then we continue by realizing that awake awareness and nonconceptual knowing are our ground of being. Next we experience the already-embodied presence, then we shift into seeing and knowing from awake awareness, and finally we begin to function from embodied, open-hearted awareness.
The Tibetan word for meditation, sgom, is translated as “familiarization.” In order to abide in awake awareness, we must glimpse it several times and become familiar with the view from this new level of mind. There’s an ongoing dance of letting go and becoming acquainted with awake awareness as our ground of being. Familiarizing is a kind of tuning in, a marination in awake awareness, a rewiring of our bodies and minds to the new awake awareness–based operating system.
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 unfolding that includes thawing out, detoxing, and gradually rewiring our neural networks. We learn to move through growing pains and to welcome rejected feelings and subpersonalities—all while the tightly held knots of energy and belief gradually detox. We learn to return to our ground of being, and we train to remain here. The shift to a new perception, knowing, and identity leads to new vitality. As a result, we discover new motivation and creative expression.
It is important for you to discover which preliminary practices, if any, are most useful for you in preparing to shift. You may already know ways of settling your body and mind. You can begin with yoga, focusing on your breath, sound meditation, or deliberate mindfulness as an initial stepping-stone. However, you can only soothe the animal of your body and calm your mind for short periods before becoming agitated or stressed again.
Don’t get caught in the trap of only doing preliminary practices; use them until they’ve served their purpose. For instance, do one-pointed meditation only until your chattering mind calms. Practice deliberate mindfulness until you see that you’re not a thought-based, small self. Then take the next step that will enable you to glimpse awake awareness—the step you might call “letting go,” “surrendering,” “turning over,” “unhooking,” “shifting,” or “dissolving.”
Once we’ve shifted to an awareness—based way of knowing, an entirely new phase of growth begins—one that was impossible before. Each of us has different knots or types of resistance, so we each need to use different ways of preparation before we let go. As we awaken, it’s important to continue our development in physical, emotional, mental, and relational areas. Growing up in other areas of life supports our unfolding. However, we can only mature to a certain level of development without the shift that identity awakening provides. From our new sense of identity, many of the problems and emotional binds we’ve been experiencing loosen spontaneously, and we open to a fresh perspective. There’s no single right way to access awake awareness or to transition into living from it, but there are some common principles and doorways.
The two most common methods for directly recognizing our true nature are the looking method and the resting method. Christian mystical tradition calls these two approaches Via Positiva (the looking method) and Via Negativa (the resting method). Via Positiva suggests: “Seek and you will find.” Via Negativa suggests: “Give up seeking, and you will find.” Most meditation paths include aspects of both these styles. In addition, both Via Positiva and Via Negativa agree that ego-identification is the obstacle to awakening.
Via Negativa does not mean being negative. It is a way of negating all the many things that obscure the living truth of our being. It is the spiritual practice of deconstructing, dissolving, and letting go of what is not our true nature. We learn how to rest until what binds and blinds us finally relaxes. The search for who you are begins with letting go of everything and seeing who or what is left. The most common form of this experience is sitting meditation.
Via Positiva, or the looking method, is the way of seeking spirit, reality, awake awareness, or true nature as simply and directly as possible. The particular looking method we’ll explore is a form of inquiry in which we intentionally and directly turn awareness around to find that awareness is the source of mind and our ground of being.
THE RESTING METHOD
Buddhism in its earliest Theravada tradition emphasizes the resting method—the most widely used direct method for accessing our true nature. In the four foundations of mindfulness, the goal is to see each of the mental processes that combine to create the feeling of a separate, solid self. Buddha avoided describing awakening or enlightenment in positive terms. Instead, he talked about freedom from suffering, fear, attachment, and hatred. There are even extreme forms of Via Negativa that regard all activity, including meditation, as egoic effort that obscures realization. This approach says, “There is no method. There is nothing to do. You are already awake; you just need to stop all effort. Be still.” It is possible to awaken unintentionally; however, the saying “There is nothing to do” is actually a pointing-out instruction that requires a small, initial effort to stop egoic effort.
In the resting method, you sit and begin by withdrawing from all external tasks. You then let go of any internal identification with doing, monitoring, analyzing, judging, and controlling. The resting method is trying to go beyond the ego-doer by taking away its job. The resting method tries not to create an imaginary picture, philosophy, memory, or idea of awake awareness. Some resting methods ask us not to pay attention to thoughts; others direct us to simply let thoughts pass by. Zen Buddhism uses two different Via Negativa approaches for letting go of your mistaken identity so that your true nature can appear: koan practice and “just sitting.” The koan method presents students with what seems to be a looking method by posing a question like: “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” The intention is not for the meditator to find an answer, but to deconstruct both the seeker and the usual way of conceptually knowing. Koans short-circuit the conceptual mind with a problem it can’t resolve, causing it to exhaust itself and release its claim on being the primary way of knowing. When pondering a koan, the student tries to find an answer until the everyday mind gives up and his or her true nature is revealed to be spontaneously there.
The “just sitting” method (shikantaza in Japanese) can be summed up by the Zen saying “Muddy water—let stand—becomes clear.” In other words, we simply stop, rest, and let everything be as it is. Then the everyday mind is able to relax its perpetual agitation. Resting from the mental pattern of ego-identification, everyday mind releases its claim on the primary level of mind and identity. When the everyday mind calms and settles, the clarity of awake awareness is revealed.
Adyashanti, who uses both looking and resting methods in his teaching, gives a helpful modern description of the resting method, which he calls “true meditation”:
In true meditation, all objects (thoughts, feelings, emotions, memories, etc.) are left to their natural functioning. This means that no effort should be made to focus on, manipulate, control, or suppress any object of awareness. In true meditation, the emphasis is on being awareness; not on being aware of objects, but on resting as primordial awareness itself. Primordial awareness is the source in which all objects arise and subside.
As you gently relax into awareness, into listening, the mind’s compulsive contraction around objects will fade. Silence of being will come more clearly into consciousness as a welcoming to rest and abide. An attitude of open receptivity, free of any goal or anticipation, will facilitate the presence of silence and stillness to be revealed as your natural condition.8
THE LOOKING METHOD
Directly seeing through our current, mistaken identity to find the foundation of freedom that’s already here is what looking methods are about. When we discover that awake awareness is already awake and available without needing to be developed, we realize that, as Saint Francis of Assisi said, “What we are looking for is what is looking.”9
The instructions that Dr. Chan and Tulku Urgyen gave me—turning my awareness to look back through what I assumed to be “me”—were looking methods. They pointed out where and how to look for my mind’s true nature. When a teacher points out, his or her work is done. You need to look and find for yourself because the teacher cannot do this for you. Once you know where and how to look, you can do pointing within without a teacher.
Garab Dorje, the first teacher of Tibetan Dzogchen, gave a very simple description of direct recognition and gradual unfolding called The Three Vital Points. The first point is to directly recognize your own true nature. The second is to decide for yourself that this is true—meaning that you’ve recognized your true nature and are knowing from awake awareness. The third is to proceed with confidence in the unfolding liberation.
Once you’ve recognized awake awareness as your true nature, it’s up to you to remain and then learn to return when you become identified. To become more familiar with awake awareness, you need to find the pointers that work best for you. Sutra Mahamudra—style practice uses a pointing within, in which you learn to look for yourself. When you practice pointing within daily to shift out of ego-identification, you engage in the practice of small glimpses many times. Different looking methods are taught in many traditions, including the inquiry practice of “Who am I?” in the Advaita tradition, or “Taking the backward step” in the Zen tradition.
As we turn the light of awareness toward the observer, an ego-identified observer cannot be found. We experience going beyond subject-versus-object duality. The observer that felt located in our head is experienced as lacking independent existence. Amazingly, there is not only emptiness as absence but an alive, spacious knowing without a specific location of observing. Egolessness or seeing through the illusion of a separate self is not the end. There has to be an awareness of what is here in its place as the new foundation of identity and base of operation. Some people get to this stage of awakening but do not know how to continue to unfold. During a phone consultation, a man named Eric told me: “I started reading online about enlightenment and then had a disorienting experience. The person ‘Eric’ was gone and seemingly nonexistent. There was no ‘I am’—only an emptiness like a room full of furniture being emptied.” Focusing on this transition of selflessness as if it were the goal can lead to stopping partway. It’s like making a goal of driving from the East Coast to the Pacific Ocean but stopping at the Grand Canyon and living there. We can get stuck in stillness, an eddy along the way that Zen calls the “emptiness of emptiness.”
The Tibetan phrase for recognition translates as “looking back at your own face.” Awake awareness is as familiar and close as your own face. Many people report “it feels like returning home” when they first recognize awake awareness. Turning around to look and recognize awareness is not the physical process of looking with our eyes. The ability of awake awareness to know itself has been called reflexive awareness. The word reflexive means “directed or turned back on itself.” Reflexive awareness emphasizes that our true nature is already here.
If we are to become aware of awareness, how do we find that first awareness that can turn back on itself? For reflexive awareness to work, we need a new way of looking, to know who or what turns around or steps back. Local awareness is the experiential answer to this inquiry, as it can move from being identified to being free. Since only awareness can recognize awareness, getting familiar with local awareness is a necessary first step. As children, many of us sang and danced “The Hokey Pokey”: “You do the Hokey Pokey and you turn yourself around. That’s what it’s all about.” A clever bumper sticker reads: “What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it’s all about?” However, my experience is that the “turning yourself around” is what it is all about.
Ramana Maharshi wrote regarding awakening: “Other than inquiry, there are no adequate means.”10 He said that inquiry was simple and direct. “If one inquires ‘who am I,’ the mind will go back to the Source . . . Not letting the mind go out, but retaining it in the Heart . . .”11 In the first part of inquiry, the mind returns to its source and then, in order to live, a new location of mind gets established “in the Heart.” This is a good description of open-hearted awareness.
Let’s explore how this new looking method works. Inquiry instructions from different traditions say, “Mind will go back to the Source,” “Take the backward step,” “Turn the light around,” and, “Let the mind look at the mind.” The important question here is, what steps back? What turns around? Where is the mind or light that can turn and find the source? Our conceptual, everyday mind cannot know awake awareness. Even attention and our subtle mind, used for mindfulness, cannot find awake awareness. Nevertheless, we have to begin to inquire from where we are now. We will discover that local awareness is able to unhook from our thoughts and find spacious awareness.
The first step in awareness inquiry is to use your thinking mind to understand the words of the question you’re trying to resolve. The next step is to understand how to look, where to look, and what you are looking with. If we use thought to look at thought, we re-create the ego-identification or mental pattern that we’re trying to go beyond. In the open-hearted awareness approach, local awareness looks through or unhooks from the mental pattern of “I.” We can then inquire: “Is there an ‘I’ here? What is its color? Shape? Size?” The result is that no separate looker can be found in any location. When we do not find anything or anyone who is a subject, we begin to experience the spacious awareness that is inherent within our thoughts and sensations.
In this step, we’re discovering the ability of awareness to turn back to know itself rather than to look out and forward at objects in the world. Awareness has to look for itself—and find itself—to be truly liberated. This method of looking is about turning around to peer back through and beyond the observing position of the ego-identity. The location of the observer opens or dissolves as we do this. We cannot stop by looking at the absence of the ego-identity, or the space where the ego-identity used to be. Here, we need to find the awareness that’s always been looking.
Awareness has to look for—and find—itself in order to live from a new ground of Being that’s not ego centered or ego identified. Here, we step out of our everyday mind and discover the awareness that’s always been looking. Spacious awareness has intelligence and intentionality; therefore we can focus, choose, and act from it.
Here’s a short description of the awareness-inquiry process: You can start by unhooking local awareness from thinking, then shift to becoming aware of spacious awareness. You are making the first U-turn (or You-turn) in awareness and identity, in which you turn away from looking out at the world and have awareness turn around and look back through the looker to find itself. The result is that you may discover that awareness is already aware of itself, by itself. Once you’re established in awake awareness, you can make the second You-turn to view and include the contents of your mind and body from the perspective of a transcendent, effortless, mindful witness. Next, awareness recognizes itself within our body as embodied presence, and then we can experience the one taste of the unity of all things. From open-hearted awareness, we can create and relate, feeling an unconditional loving connection to all.
We will need to find out where the awareness that can discover our essential nature is currently located. Consider the traditional metaphor of inquiry: dropping a pebble into a lake. If the pebble is made of conceptual thought, it is heavy and dense like a stone, so it cannot know the water. In small glimpses, the pebble is made of what it is seeking: water into water, awareness aware of awareness. Local awareness as a drop of water can recognize its source; when a drop of water goes into the lake, it is a homecoming.
Let’s look now at how awareness is normally hidden in the background, identified with thought, or caught in the middle of our way of perceiving. Awareness is commonly limited to a medium of knowing, a connection between you and what you’re seeing. In many meditation systems, awareness, attention, and consciousness are treated as if they’re the same. In Western psychology and even in our common speech, we often use the words “aware” and “conscious” as if they meant the same thing. For example, “I am aware of what I am reading,” and, “I am conscious of what I am reading.” We also use “awareness” and “attention” interchangeably: “Bring your attention to what you’re hearing,” and, “Bring your awareness to what you’re hearing.” In this way, we regard awareness as a limited type of consciousness that is “between” myself, as the subject, and an object, as in “I am aware of that cup.” In this case, awareness is the medium, the link between you—the one who is looking—and the cup, which is the object being seen.
Awake awareness is not the medium between you and an object; it is the foundation of who you are and how you know. Awareness, as used here, is different from “conscious,” “attention,” and “consciousness.” Even mindful attention cannot know awake awareness or the true nature of who you are.
Our current sense of “I” is built around self-reflective thinking, so awareness is caught in the middle and reduced to a function or tool of the mind and identity. This method shifts us from reflective thinking (thinking about thinking) to reflexive awareness (awareness of awareness). Instead of thought looking to thought, awareness looks to awareness—and then awareness can include thought.
Currently, awareness is not experienced as where we’re observing from, but feels like it’s in the middle: i.e., “I am aware of seeing the cup.”
• Awareness begins as if it is a functional tool of “I,” as in: I am → aware of → seeing the cup.
• “I” is a pattern of thought—ego-identification—that takes itself to be the subject.
• “Am” is currently connected to “I” instead of awareness.
• Awareness is reduced to attention as an intermediary tool of conscious focusing.
• “Seeing” is the particular sense that is being used here.
• The cup is the object of focus—“the seen.”
When local awareness does a You-turn and looks back, it sees through ego-identification and discovers that awake awareness is now where “am” is located.
Local awareness goes out to the cup, then back from the cup to seeing, then back through the “I” to awake awareness.
The normal way of perceiving:
I am → aware → of seeing → the cup (seen).
The You-turn reverses the process:
Aware of the seen → aware of seeing → look back through the “I” pattern of ego-identification → to that which is aware of itself, seeing, and seen.
A simple version of a You-turn:
Aware of the seen → aware of seeing → rest as that which is aware of seeing.
Awake awareness can move from being stuck in the middle as a mode of perception to turning around and looking back through the mental pattern of “I” to find awake awareness. Awake awareness becomes the primary location of observing. The “am” is no longer located within thinking, but is now felt as a boundless field of awake awareness connecting through thinking, perception, and seeing to the cup and the space, all around.
GLIMPSE 1 Seen, Seeing, and Awareness
In this glimpse, you’ll use your visual sense to become aware of awareness. You can use the words on this page as the object of focus while you’re reading, or you can learn the exercise first and then try it with another object, like a cup.
1. Become aware of the words on this page as objects.
2. Notice your normal way of seeing the words on the page: looking outward from subject (“I”) to object (words). Notice: “I am aware of seeing the words.”
3. Now reverse the process. Notice the words as the seen.
4. Next, be aware of light reflecting off the page and coming to your eyes as seeing.
5. Now follow your awareness back to rest as that which is aware of seeing.
6. Let your awareness move backwards from the seen . . . to seeing . . . and then through the “I” to rest back as that which is aware of seeing.
7. Let awareness move back from the page to discover the awareness behind and within that is already aware and looking.
8. Allow awareness to rest back until it discovers the awake awareness that is effortlessly reading the words.
GLIMPSE 2 Awareness of Awareness
1. Look out at an object in the room. Notice being aware of that object.
2. Now notice being aware of seeing.
3. Now close your eyes and feel that the same awareness that was used to look outward can now be aware of awareness. Allow awareness to be interested and aware of itself: awareness resting back to become the subject and the object. Feel awareness as intimate, soft, spacious, and pervasive.
4. Let go of interest in thoughts, sentences, ideas, or points of view. Allow your awareness to be interested completely in awareness.
5. Let the awareness rest as the awareness that already knows itself and is aware of arising experiences.
6. Notice what it is like to be aware from awareness rather than from thinking or ego-identity.
GLIMPSE 3 Awareness Yoga
In a yoga class, you learn how to move your body to feel renewed, refreshed, balanced, and unified. In this practice, we’re learning to move awareness for the same purposes. Use these four pointers one at a time to shift your view, pausing in between to experience what they point to. Instead of trying to understand the meaning of the statement, just be curious. Let your awareness look. Repeat each one as many times as you like. You can say these phrases with your eyes open or closed, as you prefer. The important thing is to shift awareness to look and to feel where you’re looking from after you shift.
• Look from awareness to see what the next thought will be.
• Look from awareness to experience the space through which thoughts move.
• Look from awareness to see what is aware of space and moving thoughts.
• Look from awareness and rest as the field of spacious and pervasive awareness and aliveness.
GLIMPSE 4 Making a You-Turn
1. Unhook local awareness from thought and send local awareness up to a corner of the room.
2. Now have that local awareness look back to and through the one who sent it.
3. Notice that in true seeing, there is nothing to see.
4. Notice the absence of a local observer in your head. Neither an observer nor the observed—just observing. Notice the boundless space that you are aware from.
5. Feel from the continuous field of awareness that is aware of itself and that is now what is seeing. Rest as this spacious awareness that is aware of what is.
6. If you chose to send awareness to a corner of the room in front of you, now send awareness up to a corner behind you and repeat the other steps.