The greatest enjoyment comes from being authenticated with
non-dual, open awareness. When you are in nature, be fully mindful
of what you see and hear. In fact it is our thinking that prevents
us from fully 'enjoying' what is present. Our obsessive thinking
will try to come up with something to worry ("what am I doing here
walking in the park, I got to do this and that, blah blah...") or
think, instead of being fully alive to what is present in one's own
experience. Also when looking at, say, a tree, one does not label
the tree, think about the tree etc, but simply submerge himself in
that pure experience of the tree.
You may encounter experiences of a sense of
openness/boundlessness, as if you are not confined and limited to
your body mind. When looking at nature, you are at one with nature,
and everything is experienced in immense clarity. When seeing the
tree there is the sense that you are the tree (more accurately
there was no 'you', just the tree), you are not some entity inside
the body looking outwards -- that you are in fact the seeing that
is inseparable from the seen. In seeing tree there is just that
experience of tree, which is pure aliveness, without a separate
observer. Any sense of a separate self, or separation, uncoils.
Everything is experienced as pure awareness. It might be a bit
difficult to imagine but once you have glimpses of this you will
understand. Yet even when one has had glimpses of such experiences,
it is not yet the same as having the realisation/insight into it
(the no-self and non-dual nature) as an ever-present characteristic
of reality, or a dharma seal, and not as a temporary stage of
experience.
Pure Awareness perfectly reflects everything in clarity like a
mirror, whether thoughts, or sight, or sound, everything is being
'awared' in/as pure awareness, our Buddha-Nature. But awareness
itself does not 'grasp' or 'seek' any of these experiences, it is
our deluded, sentient mind that does that. Awareness just
naturally, non-discriminatorily, 'awares' by itself -- like the
sound of airplane will effortlessly be heard when the condition
arise (and it's not like you have any choice in that! unpleasant or
pleasant sounds will be heard when the condition is there, whether
you like it or not), awareness is always already 'here' manifesting
as everything -- just that our being immersed in identifying with
the story of 'me', 'mine', etc that we miss it all.
Many people have pre-conceived notions that awareness requires a
lot of mental effort to be sustained. They may think that it is
some sort of highly concentrated state where one is fixated/focused
an unmoving point. (which it is not) It is not an exercise in
concentration (like samatha practices). Awareness is actually
effortless, and the practice of awareness is more like a process of
'undoing' than a 'doing' and is just allowing our pure awareness,
pure experience, to manifest in its completeness and clarity
without mental filters (symbols, labeling, interpreted, etc).
Awareness does not need a lot of effort to be 'held on to', (it is
always already naturally here), we just have to relax/release our
fixation on our thoughts and return to being mindful of our
experience, which may include thoughts occasionally arising.
The key point
about the practice of mindful awareness is there is no keeping of
the mind on anything and by not resting on anything, it fuses into
everything; therefore it cannot be concentrated; rather it is to
relax into nothingness empty of self, empty of any artificial doing
so that the natural luminosity can take its own course. There is no
focusing, there is only allowing the mirror bright clarity to shine
with its natural radiance. In essence there is no one there, only
the phenomenon arising and ceasing according to conditions, telling
their stories.
If you practice mindfulness, you will be amazed by the quality
of experience... everything becomes alive. There will also be
immense bliss accompanied by this experience.
As Thusness told me many years ago,
You must taste, sense, eat, hear and see Pure Awareness in
every authentication. And every authentication is Bliss.
Anyway being "carried away" implies that your attention is
fixated on thoughts and concepts, and you are immersed in thinking
about past and future. But if you are fully present to your
experience, that is not being carried away, more like 'returning'
to where you have never left.
p.s. an author 'Byron Katie' wrote her own awakening
experience:
Less than two weeks after I entered the halfway house, my
life changed completely. What follows is a very approximate
account.
One morning I woke up. I had been sleeping on the floor as
usual. Nothing special had happened the night before; I just opened
my eyes. But I was seeing without concepts, without thoughts or an
internal story. There was no me. It was as if something else had
woken up. It opened its eyes. It was looking through
Katie's eyes. And it was crisp, it was clear, it was new, it had
never been here before. Everything was unrecognizable. And it was
so delighted! Laughter welled up from the depths and just poured
out. It breathed and was ecstasy. It was intoxicated with joy:
totally greedy for everything. There was nothing separate, nothing
unacceptable to it. Everything was its very own self. For the first
time I — it — experienced the love of its own life. I — it —was
amazed!
In trying to be as accurate as possible, I am using the word
“it” for this delighted, loving awareness, in which there was no me
or world, and in which everything was included. There just isn't
another way to say how completely new and fresh the awareness was.
There was no I observing the “it.” There was nothing but the “it.”
And even the realization of an “it” came later.
Let me say this in a different way. A foot appeared; there
was a cockroach crawling over it. It opened its eyes, and
there was something on the foot; or there was something on the
foot, and then it opened its eyes — I don't know the
sequence, because there was no time in any of this. So, to put it
in slow motion: it opened its eyes, looked down at the
foot, a cockroach was crawling across the ankle, and … it
was awake! It was born. And from then on, it's been observing. But
there wasn't a subject or an object. It was — is — everything it
saw. There's no separation in it, anywhere.
All my rage, all the thoughts that had been troubling me, my
whole world, the whole world, was gone. The only thing that
existed was awareness. The foot and the cockroach weren't outside
me; there was no outside or inside. It was all me. And I felt
delight — absolute delight! There was nothing, and there was a
whole world: walls and floor and ceiling and light and body,
everything, in such fullness. But only what it could see:
no more, no less.
Then it stood up, and that was amazing. There was no
thinking, no plan. It just stood up and walked to the bathroom. It
walked straight to a mirror, and it locked onto the eyes of its own
reflection, and it understood. And that was even deeper than the
delight it had known before. It fell in love with that being in the
mirror. It was as if the woman and the awareness of the woman had
permanently merged. There were only the eyes, and a sense of
absolute vastness, with no knowledge in it. It was as if I — she —
had been shot through with electricity. It was like God giving
itself life through the body of the woman — God so loving and
bright, so vast — and yet she knew that it was herself. It made
such a deep connection with her eyes. There was no meaning to it,
just a nameless recognition that consumed her.
Love is the best word I can find for it. It had been split
apart, and now it was joined. There was it moving, and then
it in the mirror, and then it joined as quickly as it had
separated — it was all eyes. The eyes in the mirror were the eyes
of it. And it gave itself back again , as it met again. And that
gave it its identity, which I call love. As it it
what it is. People name things a wall, a ceiling, a foot, a hand.
But it had no name for these things, because it's indivisible. And
it's invisible. Until the eyes. Until the eyes. I remember tears of
gratitude pouring down the cheeks as it looked at its own
reflection. It stood there staring for I don't know how
long. looked in the mirror, the eyes — the depth of them— were all
that was real, all that existed — prior to that, nothing. No eyes,
no anything; even standing there, there was nothing. And then the
eyes come out to give
These were the first moments after I was born as it, or it
as me. There was nothing left of Katie. There was literally not
even a shred of memory of her — no past, no future, not even a
present. And in that openness, such joy. “There's nothing sweeter
than this,” I felt; “there is nothing but this. If you loved
yourself more than anything you could imagine, you would give
yourself this. A face. A hand. Breath. But that's not enough. A
wall. A ceiling. A window. A bed. Light bulbs. Ooh! And this too!
And this too! And this too!”
All this took place beyond time. But when I put it into
language, I have to backtrack and fill in. While I was lying on the
floor, I understood that when I was asleep, prior to cockroach or
foot, prior to any thoughts, prior to any world, there is nothing.
In that instant, the four questions of The Work were born. I
understood that no thought is true. The whole of inquiry was
already present in that understanding. It was like closing a gate
and hearing it click shut. It wasn't I who woke up: inquiry woke
up. The two polarities, the left and right of things, the
something/nothing of it all, woke up. Both sides were equal. I
understood this in that first instant of no-time .
So to say it again: As I was lying there in the
awareness, as the awareness, the thought arose: It's a
foot. And immediately I saw that it wasn't true, and that was
the delight of it. I saw that it was all backward. It's not a foot;
it's not a cockroach. It wasn't true, and yet there was a foot,
there was a cockroach. It opened its eyes and saw a foot,
and a cockroach crawling over the foot. But there was no name for
these things. There were no separate words for foot or cockroach or
wall or any of it. So it was looking at its entire body, looking at
itself, with no name. Nothing was separate from it, nothing was
outside it, it was all pulsing with life and delight, and it was
all one unbroken experience. To separate that wholeness and see
anything as outside itself, wasn't true. The foot existed, yet it
wasn't a separate thing, and to call it a “foot,” or an anything,
felt like a lie. It was absurd. And the laughter kept pouring out
of me. I saw that cockroach foot are names for
joy, that there are no names for what appears as real now.
This was the birth of awareness: thought reflecting back as itself,
seeing itself as everything, surrounded by the vast ocean of its
own laughter. and
When I try to explain how The Work was born in that instant
of realization, I can analyze the instant, slow it down, and tell
it so that it takes on time. But this is giving time to an instant
that wasn't even an instant. In that no-time, everything was known
and seen as nothing. It saw a foot, and it knew that it wasn't
a foot, and it loved that it was. The first and second of the four
questions is like the slow-motion mechanics of the experience.
“It's a foot” — is that true? Can I absolutely know that it's
true? No. What was it like before the thought of “foot”
appeared, before there was the world of “foot”? Nothing.
Then the third question: How do I react when I believe
the thought? I was aware that there's always a contraction, that
when I believe any thought I create a world separate from myself,
an object that is apparently “out there,” and that the contraction
is a form of suffering. And the fourth: Who would I be without
that thought? I would be prior to thought, I would be — I am —
peace, absolute joy. Then the turnaround: It's a foot / it's not a
foot. Actually, all four questions were present in the first —
Is it true? — and everything was already released in the
instant that the first question was asked. The second, third, and
fourth questions were embedded in the inquiry that was there in the
experience. There were no words for any of the questions — they
were not explicit, not thought, not experienced in time, but
present as possibilities when I looked at my experience later and
tried to make it available for people. With the fourth question the
circle is complete. And then the turnaround is the grounding, the
re-entry. There's nothing / there's something. And in that way
people can be held without the terror of being nothing, without
identity. The turnaround holds them until it's a comfortable place.
And they realize that nowhere to go is really where they
already are.
Our moderator Thusness also wrote about his own account of
awakening here:
Thusness's Six Stages of Experience
Excerpt:
('stage 4' of six stages)
...I got in touch with Buddhism in 1997. Not because I wanted to
find out more about the experience of ‘Presence’ but rather the
teaching of impermanence syncs deeply with what I experience in
life. I am faced with the possibility of losing all my wealth and
more by financial crisis. At that point in time I have no idea that
Buddhism is so profoundly rich on the aspect of ‘Presence’. The
mystery of life cannot be understood, I seek for a refuge in
Buddhism to alleviate my sorrows caused by the financial crisis but
it turned out to be the missing key towards experiencing total
presence.
I wasn’t that resistant then about the doctrine of ‘no-self’ but
the idea that all phenomenon existence is empty of an inherent
‘self’ or ‘Self’ did not quite get into me. Are they talking about
the ‘Self’ as a personality or ‘Self’ as ‘Eternal Witness’? Must we
do away even with the ‘Witness’ itself or the Witness is another
illusion itself?
There is thinking, no thinker
There is sound, no hearer
Suffering exists, no sufferer
Deeds there are, no doer
I was meditating the above stanza deeply…about its meaning until
one day, suddenly I heard ‘tongss…’, it was so clear, there was
nothing else, just the sound and nothing else! And ‘tongs…’
resounding…. It was so clear, so vivid!
That experience is so familiar, so real and so clear. It is the
same experience of “I AM”….it is without thought, without concepts,
without intermediary, without anyone there, without any
in-between…What is it? IT is Presence! But this time it is not ‘I
AM’, it is not asking ‘who am I’, it is not the pure sense of “I
AM”, it is ‘TONGSss….’, the pure Sound…
Then come Taste, just the Taste and nothing else….
The heart beats…..
the Scenery…
There is no gap in between, no longer a few months gap for it to
arise…
There never was a stage to enter, no I to cease and never has it
existed
There is no entry and exit point…
There is no Sound out there or in here…
There is no ‘I’ apart from the arising and ceasing…
The manifold of Presence….
Moment to moment Presences unfolds…
Presence is the Crystal Bright Clarity...
