Light

"I remember once being in a place that was so dark I couldn't see my hand in front of my face. My emotional reaction was, 'I can't see anything! I don't know what is there!' But then I thought, 'What is it, then, that sees darkness? I am looking at darkness; my eyes are functioning and seeing darkness.' Then suddenly it became obvious to me that consciousness is light, that even in the dark there is light if you rest in conscious awareness. What your eyes see is darkness, but that is still seeing, isn't it? We usually think of light as coming from outside-- from the sun or an electric light bulb-- but consciousness is light, isn't it? But this is a light that is coming from within.

"Enlightenment is natural to each one of us; it is nature, not conditioned, not to be claimed as a unique gift that 'I have because I am a special kind of human being.' If you start operating in that way, you will be operating from delusion, won't you? But see that everybody is this; recognize it in everybody."

Ajahn Sumedho, Don't Take Your Life Personally, p. 394- 395.

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Suffering as fuel for awakening

For a long time I've wondered what it means for the energy of unhappiness to become transmuted into the energy of increased consciousness. This morning I had a tiny taste of what this means and I'd like to share it with you.

There was a subtle, barely detectable sense of boredom, a very mild discontent somewhere in the background of my awareness. This kind of slight discomfort is normally shoved out of the way, to the periphery of awareness, like an annoying insect being shooed aside.  This pushing away or ignoring of minor unease generally happens automatically, without even being noticed.

But today there was a movement in the opposite direction. The boredom wasn't avoided or evaded in any way.

It became a kind of invitation to a gentle, non-judgmental, interested, and quiet awareness.

I wrote in my journal: When there is boredom or any flavor of discontent, notice it, observe it, witness it, allow it, be present with it.

Then I sat quietly for a while and this is what happened.  The energy of nonjudgmental awareness, the energy of the witnessing presence grew. Simultaneously, the energy of discontent and boredom subsided.  In this way, unhappiness was transmuted into a keener awareness. Discontent became the fuel for awakening.

It's fun to play with this transformation of suffering into consciousness when the suffering is very tiny. The same process applies to large emotional upheavals, but for me it seems easier and more effective to go through this process at first with a very mild inner turbulence. Hope you enjoy your own experiments of spinning straw into gold.

An hour after I posted this I stumbled across these words from Nisargadatta:

All happiness comes from awareness. The more we are conscious, the deeper the joy. Acceptance of pain, non-resistance, courage and endurance - these open deep and perennial sources of real happiness, true bliss.

(from Non-Duality Highlights, # 4121)

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Gratitude for image: http://www.pangolin.com/powered/index2.htm

Freedom

"To accept that our organism is a mere phenomenon, a fleeting emanation from the original source, something of no particular interest, whose individual destiny is quite insignificant, this is to be the originating source of everything."
Hubert Benoit, The Light of Zen in the West, 1955, p. 28.

There is liberation in realizing and accepting one's relative insignificance on the level of form.  The story of our lives is ultimately unimportant, no matter how grand or wretched; what does matter is this breath in this moment, the unfathomable fact of life itself.

The story-line, the content, of our lives can be honored, and we naturally will do the best we can on this level, as Eckhart Tolle says.  But to feel that the story of my life is all-important is to be lost in delusion.  I then overlook the infinite abundance of being that is actually the substance of everything that is.

Losing interest in the story isn't depressing but exhilarating. Consciousness is no longer so entranced by the spell of my-story, and it is freed to be conscious of life now and here.

An infinite sense of aliveness awakens.

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Transparency

I chanced across these words today:

"When the eye finds nothing to see, that no-thingness is perceived as space. When the ear finds nothing to hear, that no-thingness is perceived as stillness. When the senses, which are designed to perceive form, meet an absence of form, the formless consciousness that lies behind perception and makes all perception, all experience, possible, is no longer obscured by form." Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth, p. 218

I've read these three sentences several times, with long pauses in between, and every time new layers of meaning float up. In a way the senses seem like openings that become wadded up with the "stuffing" of sensory stimuli that actually blocks or distracts from a deeper perception. This is quite a flip-flop from my normal way of thinking: seeing and blindness have reversed places.

But more to the point and what really interests me, is this question: What is there to be aware of when there is nothing to be aware of; that is, when the slate is wiped clean, so to speak, and there is nothing plugging up the nervous system- no sensations or thoughts- then what is there left to be aware of? This is a hypothetical question, because as long as we're alive there are some sensations and/or thoughts present in every waking moment. But what is there to be aware of in those moments of profound, alert, quiescence when there are almost no thoughts or sensations present? Franklin Merrell-Wolff talks about attention-without-an-object, and this interests me.

When there's nothing to be aware of, then awareness is aware of itself. Awakeness is awake to the fact that it is awake. It sounds a bit garbled but to me it's the most beautiful thing in the world- it's the cosmos becoming awake to itself through this human consciousness that I am. There is a boundless transparency to this consciousness awake to itself, and it is possible to rest in this transparency.

(Gratitude for image above, from  coachaljohnson.wordpress.com/.../

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