20. Meditation 10

Consider the possibility that there is no “you” in the center of experience.

Again, take your seat and gently close your eyes And just feel your body resting in space. Feel the sensations of gravity pulling you into your seat, and let your awareness be very wide. Simply receiving all the raw sensations, tingling and pressure, vibration, itching, pain, whatever it is, pleasant or unpleasant. And in this session, you might pay special attention to pleasant and unpleasant, the feeling tone of each experience.

For the next 10 minutes, see if you can cease to care at all about pleasant and unpleasant. Just let everything be as it is. Just let your thoughts come and go, sensations in the body, sounds. And if there’s anything even slightly unpleasant, pain somewhere, feeling of restlessness, frustration, doubt. Just notice that too.

Simply be a mirror like space in which that appears and so too with any pleasant sensations or thoughts or emotions. Just let your awareness reflect all of these things equally. There’s nothing to hold on to. There’s nothing to push away. The moment you notice you’re lost in thought, just begin again.

Begin again with a bright and clear awareness. Again, notice if your awareness is being colored by liking or disliking anything, sensations, thoughts, the feeling that the meditation practice might be going well or badly. See if you can unwind all of that in this instant. Just drop it and be nakedly aware of raw sensation. In the final minute of this session, pay attention to the breath as clearly as you can.

Follow it from the moment it arises until the moment it passes away. Okay. Once again, I hope you’re finding that taking just a few minutes out of your day to do this is quite unlike not doing it. It’s certainly unlike never doing it, which is where most people are. More and more, I think you’ll see as you make a habit of this practice that this is quite a revolutionary thing to do, to even be aware that liking and not liking an experience is a separable component of the experience and that you need not always, in every case, be taken in by it.

That is remarkable insight into the nature and plasticity of consciousness. One thing that training in mindfulness can show you is that that which is aware of unpleasant sensation is the same and feels the same as that which is aware of pleasant sensation. There really is a kind of equanimity intrinsic to consciousness that can be quite liberating to discover. And if it’s appropriate to say there is a goal to this practice, that is pretty close to the center of it, to simply give up this automatic struggle we live with moment by moment and acquire an ability to leave things as they are, if only for moments at a time, to punctuate our relentless search for happiness with real equipoise and well-being, to give up the search by merely paying attention.