My husband Greg and I were talking about it yesterday, and spent some time in silence relaxing into the Background. Attention moves to a region behind the head, and the mind tends to quiet down effortlessly. Jean Klein and others recommend letting attention rest perhaps an inch behind and outside the lower part of the head. This helps siphon off all the attention often concentrated in the area of the forehead.
Then let awareness fan out and notice the whole Background area. What helps me to get a feel for this is the analogy of ripples on the surface of Being, ripples on the surface of an ocean. The ripples on the surface are sights, sounds, thoughts, feelings. The surface ripples are wonderful and it is blissful to let them slosh about however they will. There is no need to interfere with the surface ripples at all.
Now what's really interesting is the Background, that which is underneath all the surface ripples.
Can you notice and feel this Background?
It's not hard to do. It seems to help when the awareness is soft and expanded and quiet, and then this field of the Background is sensed directly. For me it feels as if it is physically behind and beneath me, behind and beneath everything I see and hear and think and feel.
It's so delightful to sense the subtle presence of this field, this Background. As I go about my day, again and again I find myself asking "Where is the Background?", and just like that awareness opens to it.
Whatever is going on is going on, and at the same time there is this wonderful Background field. I sense it this very instant. There are the surface ripples, and there is that which is beneath the surface ripples and supports them.
What is this Background? I refrain from the temptation to think too much about it or to try to figure out what it is or to define it perfectly. That's a side-road I've gotten lost in many times. I get pulled back into the mind and the vibrant sense of this Background fades.
I'm learning to be with it without thinking too much about it. Feeling or sensing the Background becomes increasingly compelling, and it is a source of endless, subtle joy.
Leaning into the Background, there is a sense of merging with it, a sense of being unseparated from it. It's a vast field in which everything arises and subsides. It makes all experience possible yet it itself is not an experience. Call it the field of being, call it the great impersonal I AM in which everything is steeped, call it emptiness. Call it the Great Silence. Whatever pointer clicks for you, call it that. For me it is the Background.
~
Posts
