Pure Awareness
a reason to make friends with your mind
[from Wat Inthakhin, Chiang Mai]
Dear Dharma friends,
I was recently in Thailand giving a dharma talk. I was in three places in 12 days with my older son. It was a lot of movement. I wasn’t able to do my usual meditative practices on the cushion. As I packed and unpacked myself and my kid, I noticed that even without a regular sitting practice I was able to draw what’s called meditative awareness through most of my day. This is the benefit of years of meditation. Even though my trip was neither silent nor still, there was a way that I could keep my attention on myself from a distance. There was space between my thoughts and the watcher of the thoughts.
Before becoming a dharma teacher I was a precise, logistically on-top-of-it kind of person. I ran anxious. I showed up to things early. I would check and re-check details. I’m not saying that I am a totally different person since being ordained, but it has been less than a year of inhabiting this more spacious mind-space, and the truth is that I have missed two flights and a train so far! Which is to say that on this trip to the other side of the world, I got to watch myself show up at the wrong domestic airport. I was at Don Muang instead of Suvarnabhumi.
I got to watch myself go: Huh. I could cry. I could call my husband. I probably would have freaked out before. Or I could go find the Air Asia ticket agent and get on another flight before this conference kicks off and I miss my keynote.
Choices! The mind-space of meditative awareness can be useful.
This experience got me thinking about the three types of awareness. When I miss my teacher Anam Thubten Rinpoche I try to channel the dharma talk he would give. (Good luck to me). I can hear him saying “pure awareness” in his Tibetan accent.
This is a talk on Pure Awareness.
The first type of awareness is what Mingyur Rinpoche calls Normal Awareness. Anam Thubten Rinpoche calls this Unawareness. This is the monkey mind that leaps about, usually frantically, from topic to topic. It wants certain things (new jackets; good hair; praise) and doesn’t want other things (blame; sickness; criticism). It is very identified with the push and pull of attachment and aversion. There is no distance between watcher and thoughts. The thoughts are loud, immediate, and believed.
When I was at this Heart Water conference in Chiang Mai, people had a lot more context for Buddhism. One participant was speaking with me and said, “Buddhists. Life is suffering.” She fixed me with a look of scrutiny.
I laughed. Buddhism can sound pretty dire when you put it like that! I explained that “Life is suffering” doesn’t mean that life is not completely beautiful. It can be hard to walk on a beach at sunset and appreciate what Buddhists mean by life is suffering. Why are we such downers?
The phrase is often misunderstood. We don’t mean that life is not beautiful and magical. I am writing this dharma talk from a cafe where a young mother just walked in with a new baby, which means that I am doing all I can to refrain from running over and snuggling that delicious new peanut. Oof.
One thing that we mean by life is suffering is living in the monkey mind. It is living within the insanity babble, which often consists of self-loathing, judgement, guilt and shame. This is a toxic place to live.
When one begins to meditate, one tunes in to the chatter for the first time. I was horrified when I first heard the way I talked to myself. I think people often bounce right out of learning to meditate because of the horror of hearing your own dialogues. But tuning out again doesn’t make it better. When we learn to meditate and start to listen, it’s not that the thoughts get louder, though it can feel that way. It’s just that we are listening for the first time.
Maybe the mind is like a tiger living in a cage in the dark. When you first throw the lights on, the tiger roars. It is angry and confused. It wants to know what’s going on.
The way to let the tiger out of the cage isn’t to shut the lights off again. You turn the lights on. You let the tiger roar. You listen to what it has to say. Yes! You sit there, and let it go on and on and on. Eventually, you have made friends with the tiger. You open the cage door and let the tiger go free.
This brings us to the second type of awareness: Meditative Awareness. The reason we meditate is to start to make friends with our mind. It is to bring some of the qualities of spaciousness into our mind-space, so that you, too, can miss flights. Meditation is where we calm the mind with shamatha, single-pointed concentration. Then we use vipassana, insight, to listen to the mind’s babble.
What is nuts about listening to your mind with some distance is that your mind will start to settle on its own. The toxicity (if that is what you’re hearing— maybe that’s just me!) subsides on its own with noticing. In the beginning you may hear that you tend towards self-criticism. Come to the January 11 New Year retreat where we’ll work with self-loathing and self-love. You may hear that you tend to let yourself off the hook. In this scenario you are a little unwilling to introspect. Maybe there is some narcissism, which is a form of pride and underneath that, fear.
If you turn the mind’s noticing on itself with kindness and gentleness, eventually the mind becomes luminous, clear, and spacious. Meditation is crucial because it is the way that the mind finds its own form.
Time on the cushion brings us to the third type of awareness: Pure Awareness.
Some people have glimpses of this space intuitively. On the beach. Knitting. Painting. Running. In a flow space. Using plant medicine. In a near death experience. Pure Awareness is our true nature, so we have the capacity to drop into it depending on our karmic propensity.
Meditating is a reliable ladder to it. Eventually you have experiences, on the cushion, where you punch through to the luminous space beyond duality. It is the space of emptiness. It is the space of wisdom. It is the space that changes your life.
You learn that your mind is inherently loving and compassionate. This doesn’t totally make sense in words so please excuse my efforts to try to describe it. What happens when you experience pure awareness once, and then a few times, is that you trust that your real self is no self, beyond words and concepts. It is big and beautiful. You start to live from that place all the time even when you are not touching it, exactly.
This is what we mean by enlightenment. Nirvana is not a heaven-place that we toil towards, aspire to, and hope to be granted if we are good enough.
It is touching our true nature and living from it.
This is a beautiful thing to experience. It comes as a relief. It is the medicine for our “degenerate age”, where time is speeding up, and systems are breaking apart.
I feel a great pull to teach on Pure Awareness because ultimately, this is how we are going to make it on our beautiful planet. Enlightenment is the sunset and the ocean’s waves. It is Jon Batiste’s Dusklight Movement and delicious new babies. It is a different way to live in our time right here.
When we speak about transformation and liberation, what it looks like is everyone realizing their inherent, beautiful, already present awake-nature.
Thank you,
Sunisa
I am liking this lens for narcissism :) As a survivor of narcissists, this makes me want to just take a deep breath and swim around in some compassion. So often it's just fear at the bottom.