LOCAL AWARENESS
Just turn the light around; this is unexcelled sublime truth.
THE SECRET OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER1
We all long for freedom, but real freedom is not a quality you gain; it is who you already are. Freedom arises from a deep sense of wellbeing that does not depend on any life circumstances. However, even when we’ve tasted real freedom, most of us can’t figure out how to intentionally return to it. What’s missing from our approach is not willingness, intellectual understanding, or effort, but the means to shift out of the confusion that causes our suffering and into the new way of being.
A student of mine, who’d only recently learned to shift local awareness, was at dinner with some friends he hadn’t seen for a while. He realized he was feeling anxious and self-conscious. He tried to calm himself, but nothing changed. Then he remembered that he’d learned a method of unhooking local awareness and shifting into his naturally peaceful mind. He’d only tried this method in the quiet solitude of his home before, but that night he decided to see if it worked at the dinner party.
While his companions placed their orders with the waiter, he discovered that only a short time was needed to unhook and shift his local awareness away from his painful, contracted state of self-consciousness and into a new way of seeing and being. He later told me, “I immediately noticed relief. My internal judge was gone—the critic of myself and others—and this allowed me to listen to my friends in a way that was much more engaged, heartfelt, and easygoing. Until the critic was gone, I hadn’t even noticed how much this anxious judge ruled my world.”
From the very first experience of shifting local awareness, many people report a kind of release or unburdening—like putting down a heavy backpack. Sometimes people experience an absence of negative qualities that have haunted them their whole lives; they feel relief from worry, agitation, fear, obsessive thinking, shame, and judgment. Others notice positive qualities like peace, spaciousness, unity, and love arising spontaneously. When you try unhooking local awareness from your thoughts, you’ll discover that you can experience the benefits immediately. The next step is learning which dimension to intentionally shift into. You don’t need to leave the room and meditate for half an hour in the middle of your workday or during a social gathering to discover the peace of mind that’s already here within.
Local awareness is one of awake awareness’s four modes of expression, along with spacious awareness, awake awareness embodied, and open-hearted awareness. Local awareness is a vehicle that is already here and can take us home. Over the ages, people have tried many methods of going beyond the mind, including using the five senses, the conceptual mind, the ego, and our will or attention—none of which can find awake awareness. The five senses can only know what they’re designed to know. Thinking is not designed to know awareness either. In order to find awake awareness, we must learn how to unhook local awareness from conceptual thought. In this way, we discover that local awareness can shift into and know awake awareness.
Local awareness is the dynamic, interactive dimension of awake awareness that can unhook from thought. It is the skillful means to immediately know our ground of being. Local awareness can shift into and know spacious awareness as itself. To understand local awareness, it’s helpful to understand the other three modes of expression of awake awareness as well.
The second expression of awake awareness is spacious awareness, which is timeless, boundless, changeless, contentless, formless, and knowing. Spacious awareness is our ground of being, the source of our identity. Spacious awareness as pure awareness is the nature of mind like the clear, open sky that’s behind and within the clouds of our body and mind.
The third expression is called awake awareness embodied, or presence, which is the realization of nonduality, when formless spacious awareness realizes that it is also form. Spacious awareness is innate within the body, the way atoms are within molecules and space is within every atom. Presence recognizes that the atoms, molecules, and our bodies are a unified expression of awake awareness. From presence, all energy patterns, forms, appearances, and matter are experienced as waves arising from the ocean of awake awareness.
The fourth expression of awake awareness is open-hearted awareness, which knows through unconditional love, interconnectedness with all things, and relationship with others. From open-hearted awareness, we have the capacity to be creative and compassionate.
It is important to remember that spacious awareness, local awareness, awake awareness embodied, and open-hearted awareness are not four separate things. They are all different expressions of awake awareness. When I say “spacious awareness,” it always means “spacious awake awareness.”
Local awareness is like an additional sense that can know the other three modes of awake awareness. Local awareness is nondual in that it can know and move between both formless awareness and forms of consciousness. Local awareness can shift into and know spacious awareness as itself. Then, when we shift into presence and open-hearted awareness, local awareness replaces attention as our way of focusing.
Once you have a sense of local awareness, you can experiment with the glimpse practices and make them your own. We will begin by learning to detach (or unhook) local awareness from your ego-identified everyday mind. Once you learn how to unhook and move local awareness, you will be able to navigate through the different levels of mind. Once you learn to shift, you will discover the positive, natural qualities that are always available within you.
Local awareness can be equally likened to a microscope that allows us to see the subtlest dimensions and to a telescope that allows us to experience the most immense ones. Although there are other ways to shift into freedom, local awareness—as the movable dimension of awake awareness—allows for fully unfolding into embodied, open-hearted awareness. Once we learn how to use local awareness, we can shift no matter where we are or what we’re doing.
Although subtly covered by the stronger, faster dimensions of everyday consciousness, local awareness is always present. Inherent within us, it’s a potential way of discovering spacious awareness, and it can eventually teach us how to focus from spacious awareness.
Local awareness is not subtle energy, not what Christianity calls a soul nor what Hinduism calls atman. Local awareness is one mode of awake awareness that’s able to focus and move through dimensions of consciousness. This capacity for turning awareness around to see itself is revered in many wisdom traditions.
In Tibetan Buddhism, recognition of our true nature is sometimes called the meeting of “child” awareness with “mother” awareness. Local awareness can move away, sometimes getting lost in thought, like a toddler exploring the world. But child awareness can always return to its source, the mother field of spacious awareness, and be welcomed home. Once mother and child know they are the same family, they are always connected. One famous Mahamudra text points to what I am calling local awareness when it says, “As this is imperative, tighten your awareness and look [at your mind].”2
Local awareness is a vehicle that travels over the living bridge between formlessness and form; it helps us see unity in the seemingly separate domains of subject and object, human and divine, tangible and intangible, finite and infinite. Local awareness can carry us from one state of being to another. We don’t have to alternate between ego-identification and spacious awareness, between “getting it” and “losing it.” We can experience both relative and ultimate levels of reality simultaneously.
Normally, local awareness is identified, attached, or obscured within the thinking mind and ego function. Yet we cannot know awake awareness through thinking; our contracted, isolated sense of self prevents us from recognizing it. We may begin with a few preliminary practices such as reading, chanting, meditating, or yoga. We can begin the journey from our current level of mind by understanding instructions and starting toward the bridge. These initial practices are done by ego-identification with the goal of relaxing the grip of ego-identification. However, in order to cross the bridge, it is imperative to let go of any initial technique, level of mind, and doer. Some people call this movement “dropping,” “releasing,” “surrendering,” “letting go,” or “turning over.” I call it “unhooking.”
We don’t have to change our minds first to unhook local awareness from thought. We unhook local awareness in order to change our level of mind. Unhooking is the ability of local awareness to detach from, tune out of, let go of, or disidentify from any state of mind. Not merely a change of attitude, it’s an experiential movement away from enmeshment with the contents of our everyday minds. When local awareness is no longer identified, we are no longer caught in ego-identification.
So the fundamental question we need to answer is: how do I unhook? But “you” don’t unhook. Local awareness unhooks from the “you” that plans to unhook. One of the reasons we have not been able to unhook easily is because the “I” can’t do it. However, local awareness is already inherently within us as an expression of awake awareness. You have the capacity to move local awareness intentionally, even though you don’t know it. Once you get a feel for it, you will be able to move local awareness from thinking to spacious awareness. It is like moving your awareness from seeing to hearing. The learning of it feels more physical than mental. As Dudjom Rinpoche says, the moment of unhooking and recognizing is “like taking a hood off your head. What boundless spaciousness and relief! This is the supreme seeing: seeing what was not seen before.”3
Unhooking involves going beyond the “doer” who started the journey across the living bridge. The recognition of local awareness resolves an ancient question experientially: If we go beyond the current ego-identified doer, how can we “do” anything? We need to find an experiential answer to this question in order to live an awakened life. Ultimately, you will be able to answer this question with your own direct experience of shifting local awareness. When you unhook local awareness from the “me,” a transfer of identity occurs, like a baton being passed between relay racers. The baton is local awareness; the ego-identified “doer” collapses like an exhausted runner. The baton is in the capable hands of spacious awareness, which can now focus using local awareness. Then, from awake awareness embodied we can begin to know and do from Being.
People often feel they must either meditate passively to discover spacious awareness or reengage the old doer in order to function in the world. When local awareness is discovered, there is now a new option of living from the unity of two worlds that have always been together. When local awareness unhooks from thinking and ego functioning, local awareness has intelligence and intention inherent within it. Thinking is returned to its natural function as the sixth sense; it’s no longer the primary way of knowing. This means that the “doer,” from the everyday mind, is no longer the actor initiating choice.
Unhooking can be the initial movement that takes us out of the ego-identified state, but it will not always lead to awake awareness. Just getting into a car doesn’t get you to your destination.
You can shift into different dimensions of consciousness: daydreams, sleep, your personal unconscious, collective unconscious, hypnotic trance, or a restful, meditative state. There is nothing wrong with any of these states. However, our particular path right now is not interested in them. Instead, we are using local awareness in the most direct way to find the subtlest, most foundational level of mind and ground of being, while trying to avoid fascinations and distractions along the way. Some interesting and pleasant states can begin to arise, but until we abide in the ground of being, we can never establish the embodied open-hearted awareness that is our home.
Local awareness has to find spacious awareness and then get to know the feeling of seeing and being from spacious awareness. When local awareness discovers spacious awareness, its job is not done. Local awareness takes over the job previously done by intention and attention. Local awareness is the skillful means of focusing from spacious awareness that can intentionally focus while maintaining an open-hearted view.
The Sufi poet Rumi called the mind a “globe of awareness.” Local awareness is like a clear bubble of intelligence that can travel and know directly from wherever it is within our bodies or from the field of spacious awareness. Local awareness knows from within its new location, instead of feeling the location of the perceiver behind our eyes, in our head. For instance, when local awareness travels to your hand, it knows directly from within your hand. When it moves to your emotions of sadness or joy, it knows from within those feelings. Like a spotlight, local awareness has the ability to focus in one area. Local awareness can become small or expand to a larger area. Local awareness can move, become identified, or disidentified. It lights up its location from within. When awake awareness is the primary operating system, we can remain spacious and open while simultaneously focusing on a particular task.
Some people do not experience the distinct separation of local awareness from the field of spacious awareness. Ultimately, it’s true that there is no separation. Here is an image that helps us feel simultaneously spacious and focused in one area: Imagine local awareness as a wave that arises from the ocean of spacious awareness. We can see how the wave appears as a distinct movement of water. From one perspective, a wave arises, crests, and breaks. Yet it never really stops being ocean. Ocean is its essence. If we identify ourselves as solid, separate waves, we may feel frightened that we are about to crash. Once we realize that the wave is only the particular, local appearance of the ocean, there is no more fear.
Awake awareness is formlessness and also inherent within form. It is not one or the other; it merely displays diverse appearances. Local awareness can shift from a coarse level of mind to a subtle level. When we are located in our everyday mind and using our attention to focus on things, we can only experience a coarse level of reality. Local awareness has the ability to experience the subtle level of intelligence any place it looks. When we have shifted to the new operating system of awake awareness embodied, we will use local awareness to focus without having to go back to the everyday mind.
Even if you didn’t know anything about unhooking local awareness before now, you can still do it. It’s not done by understanding with thought or as an act of will through intense effort. In fact, you may not understand how to do it even when you do unhook and move local awareness. It’s like balancing on a bicycle. You get a feel for it, and then you practice until you develop trust that you can do it again.
Everything in the open-hearted awareness approach to awakening is built on the first step of unhooking awareness from thought. Unhooking may happen easily, or it may take a few tries. It may not even feel like unhooking to you. It may feel more like dissolving, sliding, releasing, or stepping back—like tuning out and tuning in. Or it may happen so quickly you don’t feel the process. The key is for local awareness to completely disidentify, separate, or detach from thinking. However that happens is fine. I encourage you to experiment and find the pointers that work best for you.
The most important thing is this: You cannot do these exercises; only awareness can. Once local awareness unhooks from thought, the sense of “you” that began is no longer your current identity or location of knowing. You have unhooked from the ego-identity that started the journey, and now local awareness knows directly.
Our interest here is in directly experiencing and getting to know the different qualities of local awareness better. Let’s experience how local awake awareness can:
• unhook from thinking and ego-identification
• intentionally move to different dimensions of consciousness
• know directly from within without using conceptual thinking
• focus without using attention
Even if local awareness sounds somewhat similar to other kinds of practices, remember that the invitation now is to approach the following exercises with a beginner’s mind and an open heart. The following experiment offers a glimpse of how easily local awareness can move from one sense to another, such as from seeing to hearing.
It’s very important to recognize that attention is not the same as local awareness. “Attention,” according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, is the “act or state of applying the mind to something.”4 Attention is the way we focus when located in our everyday mind. Applying the mind is the experience of being a subject located in your head, perceiving an object (even a part of your own body) located elsewhere.
According to pioneering psychologist William James, “There is no such thing as voluntary attention sustained for more than a few seconds at a time. What is called ‘sustained voluntary attention’ is a repetition of successive efforts which bring back the topic to the mind.”5
Maintaining continuous attention is difficult because the everyday mind is not a stable entity. Everyday mind, which is trying to pay attention, is made of a flowing stream of thoughts and feelings that come and go. You can begin with the thought: “Pay attention to your left hand.” Then you apply your mind to your hand. As soon as your attention goes to your left hand, your thinking mind wanders away. The mind based in thought that started the task has already changed during those few moments. You have to remind yourself, re-creating a self in your mind. Then you have to give yourself the instruction again: “Pay attention to your hand.” This all happens very quickly.
When using attention to focus, we always lag one second behind direct experience. This means that knowing through attention is always a past experience, a reflection, a picture, a memory, or an image of what just happened. Local awareness knows directly, without needing the mind to interpret, explain, or categorize. When we don’t use thinking as our primary way of knowing, our everyday mind doesn’t need to remind us to focus.
One detour that some people experience when they’re initially learning to unhook from thought is the stretching of attention. You can remain in your everyday mind and register sensations and emotions in your body below your neck by intense-focusing from your mind, but this is not a true unhooking from the everyday mind.
Just as attention is the focusing aspect of the mind, local awareness is the focusing aspect of awake awareness. Local awareness resembles attention in that it is capable of selectively focusing, but local awareness is essentially different from attention. When paying attention, the mind is applied to an object, but local awareness knows directly from awake awareness, which is within your body.
GLIMPSE 1 Experience Attention
Take a moment right now to explore the experience of attention.
1. Look at one of your hands. Now move that hand out of your vision, and bring your attention to that hand. Try to continue applying your attention there for a short while.
2. What was your experience of attention like?
Initially, when you use attention to focus, you may feel that your head (where your brain and eyes are located) is your central place of perceiving. When you bring your attention to your hand, does it feel like “you” are in your head, looking down at your hand? Or does it seem as if “you” are shining a flashlight from your head to your hand? Or do you feel connected, as if a telephone cable is running from your head to your hand and sending signals back and forth? Do you feel how attention can wander? Are you able to feel that maintaining attention is actually a continuous process of remembering and forgetting?
GLIMPSE 2 Experience Local Awareness
Now that we’ve experienced attention, let’s see how local awareness differs. In order to experience local awareness, you need to unhook local awareness from thought and know your hand directly from within. Try this for yourself now:
1. Unhook local awareness from thought, and let local awareness begin to move down through your neck and know your shoulder from within.
2. Slowly move local awareness like a knowing, invisible bubble down your arm into your elbow. Feel the awareness of space and sensation directly from within.
3. Continue to let local awareness move down your forearm until it feels your hand from within.
4. Experience this new type of knowing that is happening directly, from within your hand.
5. Notice that when awareness knows your hand from within, it does not refer to a mental image of your hand. It feels the space and aliveness of the sensations so there is not a clear boundary of inside and out.
Notice the way in which awake awareness knows itself and your body through local awareness. Once local awareness has unhooked, thought is no longer the primary mode of knowing, yet thought is available as needed. If you do not reference a memory or image of your hand, your experience of your hand shifts into direct knowing. Direct knowing is spacious, alive, and much more fluid in feeling than attention.
You’ve just experienced how local awareness moves from thinking in your head to being able to directly know from within your hand. Now you can begin to get a sense of the feeling of local awareness unhooking and moving to other senses. The important thing here is feeling how local awareness moves. This next series, Glimpse 3 through Glimpse 6, will give you step-by-step training to unhook local awareness and begin to feel how it moves to different levels of mind.
GLIMPSE 3 Coming Back to Your Senses
In this exercise, you’ll feel how local awareness unhooks before it moves.
1. As you look at this page, feel local awareness unhook from thinking about the words to seeing the printed words as objects being seen.
2. Next, unhook local awareness from seeing, and shift to hearing. Notice the dramatic difference in your experience resulting from this small shift of awareness: from seeing to hearing.
3. As local awareness shifts back from hearing to seeing, take your time and feel local awareness as it moves from one sense to the other.
4. Now local awareness unhooks from seeing and thinking, and feels down through your neck into your upper body.
5. Notice that local awareness within your body is not looking down from thought, nor is it looking up to thought in order to know.
6. What is it like when local awareness feels and knows both awareness and the alive sensations directly from within your upper body?
7. Let’s do the previous six steps again when you’re ready, using a different object. Before you move, say to yourself: “Awareness is about to shift from thinking to seeing, then shift from seeing to hearing.” Then go slowly and feel the process of awareness moving as it tunes out of seeing and into hearing. In order to feel local awareness moving, you can take your time now: pause, look up from reading, and experience the ability to shift local awareness intentionally. First, feel local awareness unhook from seeing and move to join with hearing. Second, feel local awareness unhook from hearing and move down through your neck to know your body directly from within. Feel what it’s like for awareness to come back to your senses and know directly, from within your body, without referring to thought.
GLIMPSE 4 Awareness of Space
Local awareness is malleable: it can focus and join with one of the senses. In this next glimpse, local awareness can let go and move to be aware of objectless space.
1. Unhook local awareness from thought, and let it focus on hearing the sounds coming to one of your ears.
2. Focus neither on who is hearing or what is heard, just the sensation of hearing.
3. Notice how awareness is able to focus on the vibration of sound in this one small area.
4. Now, unhook local awareness from hearing, and open to the space outside your body in which sound is coming and going.
5. Notice the movement of sounds through space, but then become interested in the objectless space through which the sounds are moving.
6. Notice the effects of awareness of space.
GLIMPSE 5 Awareness of Awareness
In this next glimpse, local awareness moves to space and then discovers spacious awareness. Here, we will let awareness mingle with space and become aware of itself. When local awareness opens to spacious awareness, you can focus on spacious awareness within your body or go to the space outside your body. Because our senses are so oriented to the front of our bodies, it might be easier to discover spacious awareness on one side of your body or behind your body.
1. Unhook local awareness from thought, and have awareness focus on hearing the sounds coming to one of your ears.
2. Don’t focus on who is hearing or what is heard, just the sensation of hearing.
3. Notice how local awareness is able to focus on the vibration of sound at one ear.
4. Just as local awareness can focus on a very small area, notice how local awareness can now open to be interested in the space in which sound is coming and going.
5. Rather than focusing on the movement of sounds through space, let local awareness rest in the open space.
6. Local awareness opens to space until it discovers that open space is aware.
7. Feel that local awareness is like an air bubble blending into thin air and mingling with the field of spacious awareness that is already aware.
8. Let awareness palpably know and feel itself, without looking to thought or sensation.
9. Stay with this contentless, timeless, boundless awareness itself. Remain undistracted, without effort. Take as long as you need to get a feel for spacious awareness being aware of itself without any physical or mental references. It can be like tuning into a radio station of pure awareness. Only the knowing from awake awareness can confirm when you’re there.
10. For a minute or two, relax into abiding as this field aware of itself without subject or object.
11. Rest as awareness: rest in the spacious field that is nonphysical, thought free, timeless, boundless, contentless, yet fully alert and aware.
12. When awake awareness is primary, include everything and notice that you are aware of thoughts, feelings, and sensations from sky-like spacious awareness.