34. Meditation 17

Practice with open eyes and notice how every sensation arises in consciousness.

As you get comfortable in your seat. You might keep your eyes open for the beginning of this session. And take a few deep breaths. And just let yourself settle into the feeling of resting in space. And as you gaze in front of you. Just let your gaze be as wide as possible. No need to focus on anything in particular. Just stare into space. With soft eyes. Feeling the breath come and go. Listen to the sounds in the room. Arising and passing away. And as you stare into your visual field. Take a moment to look for what is looking. See if you can look back. With your attention. At the one who has seen. And this may sound paradoxical, but. See what happens the moment you look. It was a teacher named Douglas Harding who wrote a book titled On Having No Head. And the exercise he recommended to his students was to gaze at whatever has before you and. Look for your own head. Notice that your head is not one of the things you see. What is it like to see the world and simultaneously notice that your head is not appearing in it? See if that does anything to your sense of. Awareness. Harding used to say that. Where his head was supposed to be. It was just the world. See if you can be mindful of that. In each moment. And now and gently close your eyes. And pay attention to this feeling. That you might have that you’re now inside your head. Your attention is in something. But again, what you’re calling your head. The sensations you get from your skin. The muscles in your face. All of that is appearing in consciousness. That which is aware is not inside of something. Everything is in it. If you can feel that. Open your eyes again. And. Ask yourself what has changed. Is there a sense that the world comes rushing in? That space just got bigger. He might play with this. Opening and closing your eyes periodically. Is there really a change? A change in the contents of consciousness, clearly. There are things you can see with your eyes open that you can’t with your eyes closed. You still have a visual field in both cases. When you close your eyes, your visual field doesn’t disappear. All of this changing or the contents of consciousness? And more and more as we. Proceed in this practice. We going to be looking to see if the feeling that consciousness has a center. That there’s a meditator in the middle of each moment of meditation. A thinker of thoughts, a series of sites, a hear of sounds. We’ll be looking into that. That feeling, that awareness emanates from a single point inside the head. And in some ways, this is even easier to do with eyes open. Because we use vision. To define ourselves. In opposition to our environment. More than we do with the other senses. There’s a clear feeling that most of us have most of the time that we are behind our face. Looking out at the world through our eyes. But as you look out at the world in this moment. See if that feeling. Is true. You might look. To see if there’s any evidence. As you were behind your face. At this moment. And the moment you notice, you’re lost in thought. Come back to this exercise. Keeping attention very wide. With their eyes open or closed. And seeing if this feeling of being inside the head. Survive scrutiny. In the last minute of the session. Just give up all efforts. And notice whatever appears. On its own. Well, today, I introduced a slightly different exercise. And there’ll be some more of that coming from time to time, because it’s good to use this growing facility with mindfulness to engage a kind of structured analysis of experience. You can definitely precipitate certain insights by doing something a little more directed than just noticing whatever happens to arise. And if you’re interested, you might get that book I mentioned on Having No Head by Douglas Harding because he in a way that was quite unique to him, developed analogies and exercises that can provoke an insight into the illusory ness of subject object. Perception is not to say that consciousness isn’t arising in the brain. He’s not making any claims about your mind being coterminous with the rest of the physical world. What Harding was doing was showing that this sense of being inside the head from the side of experience changes when you actually look to see if it’s true. And as you play with that exercise, you might find that a very expansive and centralists sense of what awareness is.