Meditation

I’ll share this one, but I don’t expect that it will make any sense outside of my own frame of reference.

My meditative efforts of late have been focused on coming to a better understanding of my own awareness. Language is going to tie my shoestrings here, but I want to be aware of details of my awareness that I usually don’t notice. This is considerably trickier for me than “single pointed” meditation. For single pointed meditation, you continually return to a mental image. The choice of image is up to you: the cross, the character “Om”, the body of the buddha, or even a perfect equilateral triangle have all worked for me. The mind naturally wanders … and progress is measured in terms of how long it takes before I notice that I’ve wandered back into my usual monolog … and how hard it is to re-settle into my chosen image.

I’ve read from multiple sources that “awareness itself” is a suitable next step once you’re comfortable in single-pointed meditation, so I’ve been giving it a whirl.

The trick in paying attention to my own awareness, at least so far, is that I don’t have anything to hang on to. Therefore, when my mind starts making up stories (as it always does), it’s hard to differentiate that from coming to a clearer understanding. The only way to do it is to pay attention to, for lack of a better term, some poorly defined quality of my awareness itself. There is a unique suppleness to my awareness when I’m focused. As I try to focus on something that I don’t understand as well, I can tell when I’m remaining in one point (or not) by how it “feels.” This makes the strength of focus that I’ve built into a tool by which I can tell when I’m fooling myself … and when I might be simply aware of things.

Yesterday, I feel that I made good progress on this. I considered the idea that, in purely subjective terms, it does not *feel* like the universe is “out there,” being translated into my mind by way of some senses. Instead, it *feels* like when I open my eyes, a visual universe pops into being. Sounds are, subjectively, *inside me*, whatever the actual physics that leads to this sensation. Since this is an entirely subjective exploration, the subjective experience is the whole point. This calls into question the awareness as independent observer … which was where I really got some traction.

I had previously had a mental image of my awareness as a camera, taking information from the outside into itself … my mind as a closed and secret box of analysis. Instead, yesterday, I tried thinking of myself as a window pane. The distinction is that a window pane or a lens is simply at some point in the world … filtering the view of one part of the world as seen by another part. It’s not that one side is real and the other is not … nor that one side is “me” and the other is not. It’s simply one perspective through which (and this is the critical part) information passes. It’s not that I’m separate from the world … it’s that I exist in the world, and my awareness is one filter on the world itself.

See, told you that language would get me all messed up here.

Whether or not this has any accuracy or physical relevance doesn’t concern me in the slightest. What does concern me is that it’s a useful conception both for lessening the importance of “myself” relative to my distinction and uniqueness from the world, and for increasing the importance of “clarity” in multiple layers of metaphor.