Awake to Your Own Awakeness
Guided Nondual Meditation by Michael Taft
Let’s move from doing movement to a little bit of vocalizing. Normally we do some either mantras or syllables. Tonight we’ll do the seed syllable of seed syllables, the maha bija of simply “Om.” So chant with me for a few minutes and just relax. You don’t need your brain to do this. You can just actually decorticate yourself and just sit and chant. Just let the energy come out in the oms and feel the energy in the room.
Very good. Now, let’s do just a little bit of setting our thoughts aside. So, just rest in natural openness, wide awake, sitting metaphorically like the sky. And just set your thoughts aside. You don’t need them right now. You can pick them back up later after the sit, but during the sit, we’ll just take our thinking machinery and just set it down over here. You don’t really need it right now. Your thinking is very welcome to continue chugging along. We’re not trying to stop it or control it or make it go away or get some kind of silent mind or anything like that. On the other hand, we’re not engaging with the thought. This metaphor is from another century, but you’re just pressing in the clutch. So the mind is just zooming along there but it’s not engaged in any way.
Okay. So once we do that, we set the thinking aside, we disengage, then we’re just resting in natural presence. We’re not lost in our thoughts. We’re simply sitting in openness, sitting in relaxed, spacious ease. So let’s do that together for a few minutes. Just simply, naturally, present. And if you keep chronically re-engaging with the thoughts because you’ve got that habit, that’s okay. Don’t fight it. Don’t get all wound up about it. Just set them back down, and come back to presence—which is exactly what’s there the minute you set them down.
For some of us, it’s like a bowl of potato chips—they’re just there, and you just gotta keep engaging—crunch. crunch, crunch. But now we’re going to, instead, just let the bowl of chips just sit there and not touch it. And instead, just rest wide awake, relaxed, and open—in what remains when we’re not engaged, which is spacious ease and cognizance. If you want to, if that’s too open, too unstructured, you can just notice the coming and going of your breath, that easy rhythm of breathing. But we’re not really focusing on it. You’re just noticing it as something that’s happening in presence. So continue with this over and over again, letting go of engagement with thought.
Notice that each time you disengage it, there’s this relaxing, this letting go—it’s just coming back to ease and openness. Tune into this openness with each breath, which is what’s always there when we’re not engaging. Allow yourself to just become more relaxed and easy and open. Letting go of trying to do anything or make anything happen. Just quickly check. Are you lost in thought or just resting in openness? If you’re lost in thought, just let those go. Open the fist that’s clenching onto the thinking, and just let them fly away and come back to relaxed openness.
Good. Now, when we’re disengaged with thought, one of the properties is this natural presence, this openness and ease. But the other one is that we’re awake—consciousness is switched on. The light is on in the room of experience. So the next thing I invite you to do, to check out, is to allow awareness to be aware of its own awakeness. It’s not something you can point your attention at, because it’s the thing that’s paying attention. So it’s not any particular object. It’s just the fact of the awakeness. So just notice and affirm your own awakeness.
Don’t struggle. This is very easy. Just relax. There’s no part of experience that you’re not awake to by definition. So, it’s just all of experience. It’s literally the most obvious thing. Every other experience is some smaller subset of that. But the awakeness itself is all of experience, and it’s wide awake. You may notice an interesting feature. When you tune in to your own awakeness, it kind of gets more awake. It turns up the dial a little bit. Most of the time we’re kind of asleep to our own awakeness. Paradoxically, we’re sort of not tuning into that. But when you tune into it, it’s really quite awake.
Remember, don’t pick up your thinking to do this. Don’t grab the bowl of chips. Just notice. Just notice. Now, as we’re noticing our own awakeness—without engaging thought, without engaging memory, without engaging any process like that. Just try to find what’s aware right now. Try to find it. It’s not the kind of question that we answer using our memory or logic or ideas or concepts. Instead, we just look. Find what’s aware of its own awakeness. Find it.
There will be a tendency in many people to say something like, well, me. Okay. Find what you mean by me. And then you’ll be like, well, my body. Okay. What? Find you in your body. Find it. Well, it’s in my head. Okay, find it. Even if you go through that whole process, you will never be able to find a thing that’s aware. Keep looking. Don’t believe me. Keep looking. There will be awareness. Something’s aware, but it’s not a something. What is it that’s awake right now to this experience? Find it, and just keep looking. And even if you, rationally, with your memory, know, well, Michael said I won’t be able to find it. Keep looking. Keep looking. Find what’s awake.
We reflected on our own awakeness. Find the awakeness. Find the awake one. Keep looking. Where is the thing that’s awake right now? If you think you find it—like, there it is, then just keep looking at it. Try to get a clearer and clearer view of it. There it is. I found it. The thing that is awake. And then ask yourself, what is finding it? What is it that looked and found it, because—what is that second person in there?
Good. Now just come back to resting as presence, uninvolved with thought, completely disengaged from thinking, but just resting in openness. Not worrying about the fact that we cannot even find what it is that’s resting in openness. Don’t think about that. That’s crazy. If you’re sleepy, open your eyes and sit up straight. It’ll keep you a little more alert.
Good. Now can either continue just resting like that or notice your own awakeness. Affirm the awakeness and then, I want you to find out how big the awakeness is. I don’t mean a number like how many meters it is or something like that. Just find how big it is. How big is the awakeness? Go find the boundary of it. It’s your awakeness. It’s your consciousness. You should be able to find the boundary of it. So go find it and then tell me how big it is. It’s boundless. You can’t find any boundary. It just goes on and on and on.
But look, see for yourself. Find the boundary. Things in consciousness appear to have boundaries. Rooms can have boundaries. Bodies can appear to have boundaries. But the awakeness itself doesn’t have a boundary. It doesn’t have a ceiling. It doesn’t have a floor. Okay, good. Now just rest again as boundless awakeness that is wide awake and completely at ease. Uninvolved with thought, uninvolved with any thought.
Good. Now again, notice your own awakeness. Remember, it’s not something you can really point at. It’s just experience itself. The fact the lights are on in the room of experience. Notice that. And then we couldn’t find a boundary or even what’s experiencing, but perhaps we can find a center or a source. So, see if you can locate the source of awakeness. Maybe there’s like a fountain or something in the center of your head where awakeness pours out of. So, see if you can track it down. Grab a thread of consciousness and pull on it. Pull on it. Find the source of awakeness. Where does it come from? What’s the center? What’s the origin? Another way of saying it is, can you find a spot that’s more awake than any other spot? And everything from there just kind of fades slowly and slowly to unconsciousness.
Every spot in experience is equally awake. There is no center. There’s no origin. There is no spot the consciousness is coming from. But don’t believe me. Keep looking. Find it. And when you find the spot consciousness is coming from, look down into it. And as you’re looking down into it, ask yourself, what’s looking that’s in some other spot than this spot of consciousness? Oops.
Good. Now just rest again as awakeness. There’s literally no other way to rest. The awakeness is always there. Even when you’re asleep, the awakeness is awake. That’s why if there’s an earthquake jolt in the middle of your nap, you wake up because something’s awake the whole time. Something noticed.
Good. Now, just listen to the sounds of the room around you. There’s breathing, and there’s some distant traffic, and there’s the sound of the air filters, and there’s my voice, creaks and pops of people moving, and all kinds of other things. No two moments of sound are ever the same. It’s continuously different, continuously changing. Just open yourself up completely and just let the sound sweep through you as if you’re kind of transparent. And then as before, ask yourself what is listening? And then find what’s listening. Find it. And a weird thing happens. You can’t find it. And so there’s just listening. Just listen. There’s an inconceivable miracle of just listening. Nobody doing the listening, and, in a way, nothing being listened to. There’s just listening. That’s nonduality.
And then if you want something a little more challenging, in a very relaxed way, just open your eyes, if they’re not already open. Allow your eyes to be very relaxed, not focusing on anything in particular. In fact, allowing the periphery of vision to be as important as the center of vision. You don’t have to fixate your gaze, though. Your eyes can move if they want. That’s fine. And just be aware of the brightness. There’s light, and there’s color, and there’s shapes, and there’s patterns, and there’s textures. Again, it’s kind of an incomprehensible miracle that it’s happening at all. But in this broad spectrum way where the peripheral vision is as important as the center vision, just let in the whole field of sight. And then, again, find what’s looking. What’s looking? What’s doing all the seeing? Find it.
In a funny way of describing it, you look back into experience and you can’t find what’s looking. And then remaining aware that there’s nothing looking. Keep looking. And then all there is is simply seeing. There’s just seeing. There’s no one looking and nothing to be looked at. There’s just seeing occurring. But again, incomprehensibly miraculous seeing that has no boundary and no center.
And remaining totally clear that there’s nobody doing it. Allow the seeing to keep happening while you also allow that hearing we did just a moment ago to continue. So there’s hearing and seeing with nobody doing it, with no boundary and no center, no source. Just vast openness and wide awakeness. Awake to experience with nobody there.
And then lastly, trying to find who’s trying to do all this stuff. Who or what is it that’s making an effort, or trying to do something, or trying to find something, or trying to see or hear something? What is efforting? What is it that is doing the effort? Find it. It seems to be really obvious until you actually try to pin it down, and then it vanishes. It just vanishes, and you’re left with wide awake presence. Simple, natural, conscious, spaciousness, in which everything is experiencing itself. Nothing fixates, nothing congeals, nothing crystallizes. It’s just open.
So from this place of conscious awakeness, conscious openness, spacious ease, natural presence, centerless, boundarylessness. Allow these seed syllable om to re-arise for a while, and just ride on the waves of that. Just remain in a centerless boundaryless awakeness allowing the sound to pour forth.
[chanting]
Okay, good. Let’s end that there. But as usual, notice nothing really ends, because we weren’t putting ourselves in some kind of special state. So the spacious cognizance is spacious and cognizant. If you want to, you can not particularly engage with thinking and all that awakeness and openness and ease is still there. Still utterly there. It’s always there. So just notice in this kind of moment after formal meditation that nothing changed. It’s not like our special meditation state vanished. And now, okay, now I can go back to being distracted and unconscious and just lost in my Twitter feed. It’s still here, still awake.
So, we have a real opportunity at the end of any meditation practice to just notice that it just keeps going. In a typical meditation practice, which we didn’t do, but in a typical one, you know, you’re trying to keep your attention focused on something. When you’re done with the meditation, you’re not focused on that anymore. And so, you’re done with the meditation. You’re now focused on other things. So, those come to an end. Those kinds of meditation start and then finish, which is fine. But in this kind of work where noticing something that isn’t an object of attention, you can’t make awareness an object of attention. You can’t actually look at it because it’s looking.
And so it’s a strange thing, because you can’t really make it a focus object, but it can become a source of tremendous stability. So in a typical meditation where you’re focusing on your breathing, focusing on your body sensations, or maybe focusing on a mantra, or focusing on feelings of love or something. You’ve got an object over here that you’re pointing your attention at. There it is. And the thing is to sort of borrow some stability from the object. The objects aren’t really stable, but compared to our attention, they’re relatively more stable. And so, we kind of keep bringing our attention back to the thing, and eventually attention kind of stabilizes on the thing. And so, we borrowed some relative stability and it makes our attention a little stable. And because normally our attention is doing that, that feels good. And it is a powerful thing to do and it’s a good thing to get good at.
But here we’re doing something different because we’re not using our attention like that. Maybe a little bit, but at almost no spot in there was I saying pay attention to a thing that you can pay attention to. Be awake to awakeness. It’s a very different thing than paying attention to an object, because it’s not an object of attention. And so when you let go of trying to pay attention to an object, something interesting happens. You could say, “Well, my attention’s just going to go everywhere.” But really, that’s just little micro attention. Instead, what you’re noticing is that awareness itself, awakeness itself, the lights being on in the room of the mind is always on. And if you’re just noticing that, so to speak, again, it’s not like you can aim your attention at it. It’s just awake, and you’re aware of that awakeness, or awake to that awareness, or whatever you want to say—that doesn’t go away. It’s not like, oh, now I’m paying attention to this other thing. Now I’m paying attention to this other thing—because the awakeness is there in all of that. And so, instead of borrowing this relative stability for a few minutes to calm the mind down a little bit, you’re finding a sort of total stability that doesn’t go away, because the awakeness is just awake.
And so it’s very interesting. You are done with your meditation, it’s still there, still awake. and you start finding a different kind of stability. It’s not the stability of attention. It’s the stability of awakeness. And it’s a lot easier. It’s usually just not hard. And then, if you want to, if you want to—quote unquote—work—at it, then the only thing to do is just stay awake to the awakeness. Just keep noticing that. And you can do that all the time. It’s not a special state of meditation. It’s just a kind of remembrance or recognition.
And so there are certain kinds of mindfulness that are like, well, just stay aware of your breath, or stay aware of your feet as you’re walking around or something. All of which is fine, but those are just objects of attention. So, they’re going to come and go and come and go and come and go. Whereas, I would say a more profound type of mindfulness is just to continuously be awake to your awakeness that does not come and go. You again, you can say, well, what about when I’m asleep? It’s still there while you’re asleep. Still there while you’re dreaming. It never goes away.
So there’s the opportunity for a kind of continuous awakeness that is actually, weirdly—it’s paradoxical because it is the most obvious basic fundamental bottom of the pyramid thing there is. Totally the opposite of special because it is a part of every single experience. The most mundane experience, the most rarefied experience, the craziest experience, the most normal experience, it’s always there. So, it’s just the opposite of special. It’s general—but it’s also kind of an incomprehensible miracle.
And the more that you do it, the more you can’t even fathom the mystery of it. It just gets weirder and weirder in a beautiful way. How is it possible that the awakeness is there at all? So, in this way of working, in this nondual way of working, our meditation doesn’t stop when we’re done with our meditation. It’s just continuous—or at least it can be. It’s not really hard to do. It’s just that we have a strong habit of being distracted. We have a strong habit of basically going to sleep.
And this is just saying, notice that you can’t ever actually be asleep. It’s just a sort of distraction. So that’s what I have to say about that. Let’s see what you have to say about things. If you raise your hand, you’re indicating that there’s something you’d like to say and we’ll allow you to say it, but remember it’s going out live to the Wild and Woolly Internet. And also, please be mindful of your speech. So, if you have a question or a comment, or something that’s coming up, or a report, or maybe just kind of wondering about something, please raise your hand.
Q: Hello. Beautiful session as always.
MT: Thank you. Thanks for sitting.
Q: When we’re in that space where we’re looking at what is awake, trying to find being aware of what is awake, I can feel myself starting to slide into the awareness of like, oh this is boundless. There is no center. And pretty soon after that my mind goes into logical thinking. philosophizing, bring up scientific blah blah blah.
MT: So, so don’t do that, is the answer. You know, just literally don’t do that.
Q: It’s interesting. Every time you said look for the whatever, I could feel my mind sliding into that heady space instead of just being in the space.
MT: Yes. So, a couple things. Usually, I use the phrase, try to find, which is different than look for, although I may have said look for a couple times. Try to find. And, at least at first, I kept reminding you, don’t use your memory. Don’t use your logic. Don’t use your thinking. And so, this is the game. It’s like saying, hey, there’s a tennis ball somewhere in the room. Go find it. It’s not saying, “What do you know about tennis balls in this room? Have you ever learned anything about tennis balls and where they might be?” No—where is it? Go find it. Find it. So, there’s no thinking required. And so, to the extent that you keep trying to do that, there’s your edge—just relax every time you do that. You think that’s going to help, but it’s taking you away.
Q: A term that kept coming up was turbulence. It just adds turbulence to the state.
MT: Yeah. Or even more than that.. It’s literally the wrong direction. We have a strong habit of trying to approach things that way. And there’s a lot of things that cannot be approached that way. It turns out that if we want to design some kind of ramjet, we really want to think like that.
Q: The experience was interesting because it felt like I was able to lock into the breadth of the totality of awareness.
MT: Can you do it right now? It’s still there.
Q: Right. Okay, there it is.
MT: Yes, thanks for sharing. It’s just a strong habit. And so the good news is, retraining it is very easy because awakeness is always there and, actually, the thinking takes a lot of effort. And so there’s a certain power in the fact that all you have to do is relax. So it will learn very quickly to just relax instead and just be awake. Okay. Awesome.
Q: Oh, there was a moment when you said there’s just awareness that is nondual.
MT: I’m just making sure that my keywords get in there for the transcript. Just kidding.
Q: It seems like when I’m usually thinking about awareness, I’m thinking of my awareness, but my question is that the feeling of awareness is never mine, it’s just immediately connected to all awareness.
MT: Well, sure maybe. Although that’s a point of contention. But what we can say is, what is the reference of the word, “my? Find the reference. Okay, it’s a signifier. What does it signify? Where is this mine? Who is the person that says this is my awareness? Find that person.
Q: Okay. The reason it feels so positive to me right now is it feels like it’s immediate, versus I need to build awareness to get to the point to understand that all things are connected. It seems more like with this understanding, it’s like the feeling of awareness is that automatic connection to all beings.
MT: Yeah. The non-separation is the point. Okay. The non-separation is the point. You can’t find a me over here that’s separate from a you over there or a thing over there. That’s the whole dualistic construct. Oh, there’s a me over here who’s a having an experience of a you over there. Well, look for the me over here. You can’t actually find one. And as soon as you can’t find it, it means the over there is not there either. But we’re not sitting in a nihilistic void—experience is happening. That’s the interesting part. Okay. Yeah. It’s total connection, but it’s hard to say what’s being connected to what.
Q: Hi. You noted that at the end of our meditation, it doesn’t stop. And, during this sit, and as I’ve been trying to weave the practice into everyday life and stuff, there is this recognition that there’s an awareness that is, in one sense, really mundane, because if I think back—this has happened a lot of times during my life. I’ve never seen that stop, but it does feel like something starts during the sit. It can happen over and over—many times a minute.
MT: Right, because it is possible to be distracted from it. Yeah. And, in fact, we would call that going into unconsciousness. Even though, of course, by the standard definition of the word conscious, you’re still conscious, but we’re going into unconsciousness of the reflective awakeness.
Q: So, at some point, does that stop happening, the distraction?
MT: Yes. That’s indeed the point. And it doesn’t just flip—it’s like little by little, fewer and fewer times in the day are you lost into that kind of unconsciousness. And in the traditional way of talking about it, that is the fundamental issue. We have kleshas. We have attraction and aversion and all that. But all of those things reduce down to one thing which is just unconsciousness—that sort of lostness. And so each time, we just come back to being aware of our own awakeness, awake to our own awareness, we’re getting at the root, absolutely the root of the issue and coming back to just here.
Q: We can stay conscious of that even while using your cell phone?
MT: It’s hard.
Q: Thank you.
MT: What else is going on out there?
Q: When you were asking us to go find the different things, there were a few times where I didn’t try to find it. I just said mentally, say what? Instead of trying to find the awareness, there was just this sense of, oh well, it’s there—just like that. I can’t find it so I didn’t I didn’t look for it. Is that okay?
MT: It depends. A couple times, at least once, I told you not to do that. Like, if you know that you can’t find it, look anyway. Look anyway. Why? Because if you’re just sitting in the idea of not finding it, you’re not doing it. Right now, you’re just in a concept, which is just as bad as any other concept. You’re in your thinking. So there’s something really important about looking and not finding again and again and again until you are convinced in the marrow of your bones that no matter how hard you look, you will never find it. And then you look again and you still don’t find it. There’s a certain kind of experiential conviction that comes from that that’s quite different than just knowing as an idea. But, as I said, it depends, because, on the other hand, I don’t know, maybe you have that experiential conviction, and you’re just, okay, I’m just sitting here, wide awake. So it depends.
Q: Thank you.
MT: But you know, all these techniques, every single thing we’re doing, everything that every meditation is trying to do is to get you to break out of all the different boxes of concepts, and just come into experience. And because all of us are lost in different kinds of concepts, and different kinds of boxes, and contracted into different conceptualities, and congealed around whole other thought systems, different practices are required for different people to open up in different ways. And even me describing it like that is now a new box and concept that people can get caught up in. So we just keep smashing it and keep smashing it and keep smashing it till one of these days you stop doing that, and just wake up to just existing outside of a virtual world in your head. Everyone’s lost in a dream. Wake up. That’s why it’s not enough to just, in the dream, go, I know I’m in a dream. No. Wake up. So that’s what I’m trying to say.
Q: Okay
Q: Hi. Thank you so much. You kind of answered my question, but just in case you didn’t answer a part of my question, I’m going to ask it anyway. How do you then deal with internal defiance, but in the sense of when you’re searching. It’s inside of myself. It’s just that a part of me gets defiant. It’s like I already know the answer. Which I don’t, but whatever it is to like my own belief system, it’s like, oh, you know, for me it’s like, oh, it was God. That’s why I can do this and blah blah blah. And I was like, “Okay, well, maybe I’ll keep searching.” And it was just like an internal defiance. I’m like, “Oh, no. I already know.” So, how do you move through that?
MT: Well, see where that gets you.
Q: Nowhere. I already know that. Right.
MT: Well, apparently not. Right? So, in other words, you’ve got to run with the defiance until you’re just tired of the fact that the defiance doesn’t go anywhere because it is just running around in its own little cage anyway. So, you have to be convinced of the pointlessness of it. And you may just have to run around in a circle a couple million more times until you’re like, okay, I could defy all I want and I’m still here. So, it’s like that with everything in a way. In a way, this is why you can’t, in a much larger frame, or in a more grandiose scheme of things, you can’t bring—there’s 30 some people in the room here, not 30,000. That’s because you can’t get people to do this until they already recognize that all the other stuff is pointless on some level. There’s a thing you can’t get at by doing all that other stuff. It’s not that it’s pointless in its own terms, but it doesn’t get you the thing. And so, at a certain point, you’re like, you know, my skull is broken from beating against the wall. I’ve got to do something different. And so you come and sit in a room where someone’s like, find your mind, and you start to go, okay, and something else is possible here. But, there’s still threads there—the entire being is not convinced yet. Okay.
That’s why in the Buddhist tradition, in the Hindu tradition, what do you start out with? You start out with hey, you’re going to die soon. Hey, you better get your head into the game here because you’re just spinning your wheels and life is draining out the bottom of the hourglass. So, they’re trying to like, come on, it’s not working, is it? Let’s do something different. And so, here, just depending on the fact that anyone who shows up here is probably already at that place, and because it’s not the general religion. So, in one way of answering your question, I would just say you just gotta get tired of it. I’m not sure there’s a weapon against the defiance. It’s just like okay, defy away—this is you talking to yourself, not me talking to you—defy away, defiance. I’ll wait for you to get tired. Okay.
Q: Thank you. Yeah.
Q: You were instructing us to disengage from thought, then become awake, and find and search for awakeness, consciousness, me all these things.
MT: Yeah, I would say that I was encouraging you to disengage from thought and notice that when you do that what’s left is awakeness. Not trying to become awake, what’s left is awakeness.
Q: Okay? So if we’re striving to be awake and be less distracted in totality, in those moments where we are engaged with thoughts, whether you’re having a conversation with someone, or you’re creating something, or you’re instructing people to do something, how do those how does engaging in thought and being awake thing coales into one thing? I was then thinking about that as I was engaging in thought, creating this question that I’m asking, and it felt like you could almost be awake with the thoughts. But I’m curious how you might describe how those things kind of coalesce into one thing.
MT: You absolutely can. It’s just that it’s harder. So you first, it’s usually for most people much easier to find it outside of engagement with the thought. And then as you get really comfortable with that recognition of the openness and the awakeness, then you can start noticing that that doesn’t go away when the thoughts come up—at least it doesn’t have to. That takes more confidence and more clarity. The thoughts are just as awake as anything else, but we can be distracted by the content. So, eventually the whole idea that there’s somebody in there who’s doing this thing called thinking is gone anyway at the start—it’s just a fantasy anyway. There’s no little person in your head. There is no little person in your head. So, everything’s just coming out the front of your face to begin with. So, just get over that fantasy.
All right, let’s meditate. I’ll shut up. Thank you for your questions and comments and interest and engagement. What we will do now is have about five minutes or so of just silent meditation.
All right. Thanks for coming out on this cold and rainy night to meditate with me at Alembic. Thanks everybody.
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