Fluidity

Let’s explore the fluid nature of awareness with some simple exercises focusing on different aspects of our experience.

We can easily focus the attention on any of the sense experiences: sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell. We can direct the attention toward the experience within the body, noticing specific sensations like pressure, temperature, skin sensations, breath sensations, etc. Or we can relax and open the awareness to experience a sense of the whole body at once. We can direct our attention to the mental activity we experience, noticing thoughts as they arise, change, and dissolve.

So we see that the awareness can be controlled or directed to any specific content of our experience, but we can relax even further, letting go of the conceptual content of our experience; letting go of the specific sensations, feelings, thoughts, and concepts that arise. We then begin to see the process of the mind; how it is continually thinking, planning, worrying, imagining. With continued practice of letting go and relaxing the awareness, we can begin to see the subtle nature of the qualities of our thoughts, the feeling tones that underlie the experiences that arise. We see some unwholesome qualities that tighten the mind, like anger, worry, fear, dullness. And we see some wholesome qualities that tend to ease and relax the mind, like joy, kindness, compassion, peace and equanimity.

When we are able to let go even of holding on to these subtle qualities of mind, then we can rest in the spacious stillness, aware of awareness itself, without holding on to any concepts.

This quote is from the book Resting in the Waves by Doug Kraft.

As attention moves from content to processes to qualities, the object of awareness — what we are attending to — gets subtler and more refined. If it keeps moving in this direction, all objects begin to fade into the background or disappear. We could call this “pure awareness,” because it is awareness without anything in it. Without an object, awareness turns back on itself: awareness of awareness. It’s hard to describe because language is too coarse.

It’s as if we’re walking through a large field. There’s such a cacophony of life to observe that, at first, it helps to focus attention by noting: “oak tree,” “butterfly,” “flower,” “grass,” “ladybug,” “blue jay,” etc. As we relax, seeing, hearing, and feeling become more nuanced. The labels that helped steady attention become unnecessary — even distracting. So the naming fades into the distance. There is an easy stream of phenomena without commentary. The observed and the observer (us) merge into an unnameable flow of suchness. This is a taste of pure awareness of awareness.