Number 6, October 2003
Awareness, seeking contact, rides into the energy fields of the body as it reaches toward the life experience (What is another?). Awareness enters the nerve currents of the body's senses and the space of awareness becomes filled with the sensorial content. This content, made of light, energy, sound, and so forth, fills the empty space of awareness. Awareness no longer contacts its empty nature and thus seems obstructed from directly experiencing it.
There is a rich mess of energy experiences and awareness gets lost in it. In fact, after a time, it forgets about its initial pure state entirely. The play of energy becomes a permanent aspect of awareness and becomes its entire reality.
The energy does not just flow from one state to the next in an unobstructed way, however. It gets channeled by all sorts of conditions, restrictions, protections, and articulations that build up as the character structure of the individual. These structures contribute in their own way to the perception of reality.
One of the key conditions, the instinct that pulls away from suffering, restricts the energy from easily changing. Awareness that is deeply lost in the ego doesn't like changes and it feels a kind of anxiety when change occurs. It is said that, after a while, people in hell don't want to leave!
What untangles this mess is awareness becoming aware of its own essence-nature. This is the "view" that awareness of awareness (AoA) practice produces and it is just pure awareness aware only of itself. That simple state is the base from which one brings enlightenment into life.
AoA is like an initiation. "Initiation" means a restart, like restarting your computer. It is starting from the fresh source of its own nature, from a state of "nothing yet." "Initiate" means to begin. You go to the simple place of "beginning to be aware," the place before any thought or experience occurs. By detaching awareness from what it is aware of and being aware only of awareness, the awareness is purified so that a fresh, clear awareness begins to experience as if it never experienced before.
What are the qualities that awareness experiences when it begins to experience the play of energies from this clear base? Awareness is wide open. Things seem to begin on their own. They become, as if arising from some invisible energetic base. They appear as sparkling forms, hinting of some primordial depth from which they still carry some residue, having not yet fully left the ultimate source behind. They are novel, immediate, present, fresh, unique.
I've been calling this the "ingression of novelty*." We see things with a primordial freshness, very much in the "now." We see things becoming as they become. We see them with pure awareness. We know these things with the kind of knowing that does not create a mind and which is not influenced by mental attitudes. Just pure knowing.
Check it out. And go with confidence.
*A term coined by the late Terrence McKenna.
| On October 25th, we will hold a Dogzen Great Liberation
One-Day Practice (Saturday, 8:00 AM to 4:30
PM). This is for anyone who has done dyads before who also wants to try
out the awareness of awareness path and ingression of novelty experiences. It's fun.
It is also a pot-luck feast. No charge, just bring some food to share.
If you want to attend, just contact Edrid. Contact info: email Edrid at edrid@sandoth.com
Note: The October 25th date is a change from earlier announcements. If this causes any inconvenience, please accept my apologies. We needed to change the date. |