22. Meditation 11
Practice with your eyes open, and drop any identification with thought.
Once again find your seat and take a few deep breaths and gently close your eyes. You’ll find you can meditate with your eyes open or closed. It doesn’t matter in the end, but for the moment, let’s keep them closed and become aware of the sensation of breathing. As we did yesterday, become aware of the feeling of your face and head.
Whatever it is that’s appearing in consciousness that tells you you have a face and a head, whether it’s pressure, temperature, something is appearing. And yet most of the time we feel that we are in our heads, behind our faces. I want you to notice how untenable that is from the point of view of consciousness. The feelings of your face and head are rising in consciousness in this moment. They’re appearing in this same condition where sounds and other sensations and even thoughts themselves are arising.
Your thoughts are not in your head as a matter of experience. Everything is simply appearing in awareness in this moment. Again, this is not a statement about consciousness being independent of the brain. We can think and talk about that in one of the lessons. I’m talking about the raw experience.
There’s just sensation arising in each moment in consciousness. And this includes the feeling of having ahead, the feeling of being behind your face. And it even includes the experience of looking out at a world that appears to be other than what you are. So in this moment, open your eyes and simply look at your visual field, at this bright display of color and shadow. This too is appearing in the same space.
This is the same place where thoughts and sensations are arising. This is consciousness. And if that’s not obvious to you, I’d like you to consciously visualize something in the space before you. Picture a candle burning a few inches from your nose. Something appeared there.
People who can visualize very clearly might see something quite vivid. For others of us, it could be just this subtle impression of vision, but something happened. Right? That’s a thought appearing in your visual field. All of this is a construct of your brain that has very much the quality of a dream.
In waking life, our brains are doing much the same thing they’re doing while we’re dreaming. They’re just constrained by data coming in from the world. But everything you can see in the world as the world is appearing by virtue of what your brain is doing, and it’s appearing in consciousness. And there’s only one space in which anything can appear. And it’s right here in this field of color and light and sensation.
K. There’s a unified space wherein everything that can be noticed is noticed and changes moment to moment. Now close your eyes again. And rather than lose your connection to seeing, now stare into the darkness behind your eyelids. That too is a visual field.
Really, every bit as much as what you saw with your eyes open. It may be indistinct. You may be apt to forget about it in a few moments, but there is potentially much to see there. As a matter of experience, there’s nothing outside of consciousness. So simply rest as that condition in which thoughts and sensations and sights and sounds and moods and emotions arise in each moment.
You find your attention becoming diffuse. You’re not noticing anything with any real clarity. You might sharpen it up by paying very careful attention to the breath. And again, the use of a mental note can be very helpful here. Either in and out or actually counting your breaths.
And starting again at 1 when you lose count. In this last minute of the session, just begin again. And just leave your mind totally relaxed. And notice whatever you notice spontaneously. Well, as you can see, some of these sessions have a little more of a philosophical character.
The kinds of considerations I’ve been talking about in some of the lessons begin to intrude. I try to strike a a balance here. But sometimes, it’s good to bring into a meditation session a more conceptual approach, which is what I did a little at the beginning here. We will be revisiting this territory many times before the course is over. So if some of it seemed a little hard to grasp at this point, no worries.
Once again, thank you for your practice. Please don’t underestimate the power and utility of spending just 10 minutes like this each day. As I said at the beginning of the course, the difference between 0 and 10 minutes is truly enormous. So you should feel very good about spanning that particular gulf.