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Practice for seeing all life as “symbol” – symbolic of the Divine
(NOTE: This is a selection from Loch Kelly’s book, “The Way of Effortless Mindfulness.” I’m putting it here for the January-March LaGrace class on symbolism. I’m going to be presenting on the theme of all life as Divine symbol for the 3rd session. I’m playing around with how experiential to make it. The idea is, what matters most in perceiving the Divine symbolism in life is the stance from WHERE we are aware, from where we are conscious. if we are conscious IN or WITH the outer mind, we will “see” and “hear” very differently than if we look and hear from the inner realm, and even more dramatically if we “look through the eyes of infinity” – looking from the soul or the Self.” I love to challenge myself to express Integral yoga in as many “languages” as possible. here, Loch is using a modernized form of Tibetan Buddhist “glimpse” practices (practices that to the best of my understanding, are identical in spirit to many given by the Mother and Sri Aurobindo). I’ve rarely seen such a clear, simple distinction between witnessing, or being aware, from the mind (what he describes as the first four forms of “deliberate” mindfulness) and being aware from the Self (seeing FROM boundless, spacious awareness) and from the soul or psychic being (seeing/feeling/knowing FROM “open-hearted awareness) . I’d love to get feedback from you on how this connects with your experience – your experience of symbolism, and your experience in general. Thank you!)
SOLUTION FOR THE LENS OF AWARENESS HYPOTHESIS
We suffer because we are in too limited a form of awareness – distracted, narrow or detached perception.
Opening our lens of awareness leads to seeing more clearly and feeling more connected. One significant difference between deliberate and effortless mindfulness is the
type of awareness each uses. In this section, we can explore eight distinct types of awareness related to deliberate and effortless mindfulness that will help us discover open-hearted awareness to help us live an awakened life.The first four types of awareness related to small mind, small self, and deliberate mindfulness are:
- Attention
- Self-awareness
- Subtle energy awareness
- Mindful awareness
These are followed by four types of awareness that are related to awareness-based mind, Self and effortless mindfulness:
- Awake awareness
- Local awake awareness
- Awake awareness-energy
- Open-hearted awareness
GLIMPSE PRACTICE
Looking from awarenessWhen you look AT awareness now, does it have a limited shape, size, location, or color? When you look FROM awareness, is there a center FROM which you are looking, or is everything interconnected?
In the following sections, we’ll look more closely at each of the eight types of awareness.
TYPE ONE Attention
Attention is the ability to concentrate, focus, and be cognizant of something from our everyday mind so that we can function in our daily activities. As mentioned, the Merriam-Webster definition of attention is “the act or state of applying the mind to something.” Applying the mind is the experience of being a subject located in your small mind, perceiving an object (even a part of your own body) located elsewhere. Attention is related to using our small mind.
TYPE TWO Self-Awareness
Self-awareness is a psychological term referring to self-reflection and the ability to split off thought to create an observer of one’s thoughts, individuality, and behaviors. This unique form of a human being’s awareness develops in children when they are between one and two-and-a-half years old, when they begin to recognize themselves as separate individuals from their caretakers. This is when they begin to use the pronouns I, me and mine.
However, it’s not the naming of oneself as a separate person that causes a separate sense of self. Self-awareness, which is one of humanity’s greatest strengths, leads to the creation of a small self when we split our thinking into two parts. Self-awareness becomes the center of the separate small self that feels like “me.” Self-awareness is aware from a manager part which may be referred to as an “ego identity.”
TYPE THREE Subtle Energy Awareness
There are two types of subtle energy awareness.
The first is internal, which is experienced as energy in and around the body as well as within (like your emotional body, chakra system, chi, prana, central channel in front of your spine, and inner body presence). The second is external, in our environment, such as other people, groups, physical spaces, nature, emotions, objects, and subtle realms often called psychic or spiritual. Subtle energy awareness is a normal human ability to internally and externally feel or perceive people, spaces, and things.
I include this second type of subtle energy awareness of people, places, things, and other dimensions because it has historically been omitted from our modern psychological map or dismissed as if it were imagination or projection.
Studies on highly sensitive people, mirror neurons, and what Dr. Dan Siegel, professor of psychiatry at UCLE and executive director of the Mindsight Institute, calls “attunement” in interpersonal neurobiology are beginning to validate this category of awareness within the paradigm of scientific materialism. When I ask a group of students, how many of you have ever walked into a room and felt that someone is upset without looking at their body language?” usually three quarters of them will raise their hands. (It’s important to note that without the grounding of awake awareness – type five – many highly sensitive people can get overwhelmed by subtle energy because, without awake awareness, we are still experiencing sensations and events form the view of a small self within a separate physical body).
TYPE FOUR Mindful Awareness
Mindful awareness is a witnessing awareness that is sourced in the subtle mind. Subtle mind is what we attempt to access in deliberate mindfulness in order to observe the contents of the mind. It is the ability to step back like a detached observer of thoughts, sensations and feelings. Mindfulness awareness is aware of the everyday mind and the commenting, planning, judging functions of self-awareness. It is nonjudgmental and neutral – not attached to thought. Mindfulness awareness is located as a meditative point of view, which some people call “the observing ego.” Whereas self-awareness is a layer of the personality that has an agenda, mindful awareness is the subtlest layer of the small self.
Neither attention, self-awareness, subtle energy awareness, nor mindful awareness can know awake awareness.
The next four types of awareness are where effortless mindfulness begins. It is important to distinguish awake awareness from the first four types of awareness in order to continue to wake up and grow up.
TYPE FIVE Awake Awareness
Beginning with awake awareness, the next four types of awareness are related to effortless mindfulness. Awake awareness is not the stuff between you and an object; it is the foundation of who you are and how you know. Awake awareness is natural awareness that is present already, available to all of us without having to be developed or created. Awake awareness is the source from which all kinds of thought, knowing and intelligence arise. Awake awareness, as the invisible intelligence, knows that it is what everything is essentially made of.
One reason we don’t usually tap into awake awareness is that we’re generally looking out from it. Awake awareness is the source of knowing, the nature of mind. It is prior to thought, what thought is made of, and beyond thought as nonconceptual wisdom, which can use thought when needed. We can only know awake awareness when it has recognized itself.
Effortless mindfulness begins by looking back through the mindful witness to this spacious, already-awake awareness. This is how effortless mindfulness moves past the deliberate mindfulness levels of awareness. Deliberate mindfulness stops at the point of a mindful witness, or perhaps even at the absence of a separate self or at a gap of not-knowing, or at deconstructing the small mind into its component parts and staying within the realm of psychology rather than finding the Self that can assimilate all of the parts. Effortless mindfulness moves beyond into awake awareness, the spacious emptiness that is everything. The shift from deliberate to effortless mindfulness can feel like a step back from everything, but effortless mindfulness isn’t about progressively pulling back farther and farther, zooming out like a movie camera.
With effortless mindfulness, we turn awake awareness around to discover who or what is behind the camera. When the meditator is looked for with awake awareness, none can be found because when awareness looks back, the location of the mindful witness merges or dissolves. The magic we discover is that there is seeing but without a seer or source of seeing.
TYPE SIX Local Awake Awareness
Local awareness is the dimension of awake awareness that can move from identification with our body, small mind, and small self to awake awareness. It is also how we focus from awake awareness-energy on any task or object. Once we are introduced to local awareness, we don’t’ have to come back to use attention to focus from awake awareness-energy.
Local awareness is like another sense that is designed to know awake awareness. It allows us to be both spacious and present, so we don’t have to be either limitless or limited.
TYPE SEVEN Awake Awareness-Energy
As soon as awake awareness moves from knowing itself as awareness to experiencing any energy, form or appearance, it becomes what I call awareness-energy. In this experience of effortless mindfulness, awareness is not separate from energy or appearances. Thoughts, feelings, and sensations are made of awake awareness and known simultaneously from the outside and from within. It is as if the ocean of awareness, with all experiences, including our own body, is waves of awareness-energy. My friend and colleague, the spiritual teacher Adyashanti, put it this way:
When we perceive ourselves as consciousness, as awareness itself, it is life changing. This is a significant insight, and we can even call it its own kind of awakening – a fundamental shift out of identification with thoughts and feelings to the purely subjective experience of being consciousness or awareness – but it is not an end point. It is a midpoint of realization. We still have a fundamental difference between the perceiver and the perceived, between awareness or consciousness and everything that awareness or consciousness is aware of or conscious of. Next come the deeper states of realization, when the perceiver or the witness state collapses and when the perception of subject and object collapses. That is when we find our truth about the nature of our existence.
The movement of viewing from a mindful witness to awake awareness-energy is the “collapse” or unity of subject and object. The view form awareness-energy feels interconnected with what we are aware of, without being identified with anything. Awake awareness-energy experiences directly from all around and within on a felt-sense level, without viewing from a witnessing awareness, without merging back into subtle energy, and without reidentifying with the small self.
At first, awake awareness-energy is experienced as an all-pervasive field of dynamic intelligence and energy. Then the feeling of oneness becomes a unity that has unique expressions and appearances in the field of perception. There is a simultaneous feeling of local embodiment and vast openness and interconnectedness to all existence. The root word of the word existence in Latin – existere – means “to come forth, stand out, or emerge.” Here, the wave of awareness emerges form the ocean of awareness while still being of it.
In the North India Mahamudra tradition, this stage of realization is called “one taste” because stillness, movement, thought, sensations, and forms are all recognized to be made of awake awareness-energy. When we are experiencing from awake awareness-energy, we are aware of everything we see with our eyes on not just the physical level but also a felt-sense level.
We can experience boundlessness and boundaries, spacious and permeating awareness-energy, and a feeling of being everywhere and nowhere and very much here. Awareness-energy is not in your body; your body is made of this alive awareness. We simultaneously experience a felt-sense of our body from within and all around, and we feel interconnected with everybody. One of my students reported, “I feel like a cat walking: fluid, connected, both soft and strong, without being tight or in my head.”
TYPE EIGHT Open-Hearted Awareness
Open-hearted awareness is aware from heart-mind. With open-hearted awareness, we can welcome all thoughts and emotions, and we recognize the same open-hearted awareness in others.
From open-hearted awareness, we feel connected and protected, vulnerable and courageous, and motivated to create and relate. Open-hearted awareness looks from a wisdom-based loving intelligence that feels boundless, interconnected, and fully human.
We begin to notice infinite boundless love as the ground and then notice our true Self as the open-hearted awareness loving presence. This allows us to feel what we need to do to let that safety be felt, to be vulnerable to the deep abiding safety that is always right here. You need to nothing but receive the love and safety. From open-hearted awareness, you are the Self that is receiving, made of, and giving the unconditional love that arises naturally.
GLIMPSE PRACTICE: Knowing from Open-Hearted Awareness
Instead of going to thought to know, look to wordless awareness. Pause…. And notice this awareness is outside and within. Feel the openness as this field of awareness-energy connects with your body and knows from a new location of open-hearted awareness.
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2 Replies
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Excellent overview!
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