13. Awareness

Back in chapter 10, we looked at what is.  What am I?  What is this world I find myself in?  What is the isness of what is?  What does it mean to be?  These questions led us to the underlying question of Being.

We looked at different ways to explore Being.  The first idea was to `just be.'  But because that is not easy, we considered a compromise, extending it to `rest in Being.'  While easier, it still is quite a challenge to see what this resting can mean, in practice, beyond just taking it easy.  This led to a second compromise, `play as Being.'  Playing is more active than resting.  It has the drawback of possibly distracting us from the question of Being, but it has the great advantage of providing an easier entrance way.

But how to connect the Playing with the Being, how to connect our play with what Is?  As a third compromise, we began to look at aspects of Being, before returning to Being as a whole.  We started with Space and Time, in the previous two chapters.  And in addition we mentioned Awareness, as a third aspect.  All and everything that appears, all phenomena, appear in space; but they also appear in time; and they also appear in awareness.

We are in the habit to say "they appear in our awareness", as if we are the owners of our awareness.  But as we discussed toward the end of chapter 11, it may be more accurate to say that awareness owns us.  Or at least my sense of self appears within awareness; it doesn't stand somewhere outside.  But however we want to view those relationships, it is clear that no phenomenon is a phenomenon without there being space, time, and awareness for the phenomenon to appear in.

13.1. Stillness

How to explore awareness?  Let's quickly review first how we explored space and time.

Two chapters ago we explored space in a variety of ways.  We looked at edges, contrasting visible things with space; space which is invisible, strictly speaking, but the presence of which is very visible, as in giving room for things.  We also moved from physical space to mental spaces, as that what provides room for thoughts and feelings and memories and so on to appear in.  Within those other spaces, we looked at edges of our positions, and we even moved on to a space of spaces, the basic space of phenomena that provides space for all other spaces to appear in.  We experimented with letting ourselves be seen, and we explored the freedom that comes with a lessening of our habits of identifying with what we have, a move that creates far wider space for us to live in.

In the previous chapter we explored time.  We started by doing nothing, to see what would happen.  We moved from there to noticing thoughts and other mental events, as well as sense impressions and whatever appears, without holding on to those.  This resting in the present led us to consider the notion of needs, and whether it can make sense to go beyond needs and views; and to consider who or what would be left in that case to deal with no-needs and no-views.  Finally we explored the dynamics of the moment, noticing how we tend to lean forward, into the future, and how we can take each moment in and as itself, without having to tightly string moments together.

And now we're ready to explore awareness.  We can start with something very simple.  In the middle of daily life, stop for a moment with whatever you are busy with, whenever that is convenient.  Then take a good breath.  It doesn't have to be an especially deep breath, but it should not be too shallow.  Just take a good healthy breath, and while you are doing that, be still.

That's all, be still.

You can focus on your breath, on the air filling your lungs, and the motion of your lungs slowing down, and pausing perhaps for a brief period before the air is let out again.  Don't try to regulate your breath, just let it come and go naturally.  But don't focus too strongly on your breath, or on anything else; that's just one way to get into this kind of practice.  As soon as you're comfortable with it, you can forget about the breath.  Just be still.

13.2. Snacking on Stillness

You don't have to force stillness.  Trying too hard to be still will make you far from still.  But not trying at all is unlikely to let you taste stillness either.  We can experiment in between the two extremes, in order to find a comfortable position, like in the middle of the saddle on the back of a horse.  The more you find that spot, that relaxed stillness, the easier it will become to return there, time and again, at different times of the day.

Within that stillness, don't try to ignore what appears.  Rather, watch what appears, inner or outer, within the stillness.  Like watching birds and clouds in the sky, or fish in the water, watch what appears in your awareness.  You can remain aware of the sky and the water, while also watching what appears in it.  Similarly, be aware of `stillness awareness' while also remaining aware of anything that continuous to appear in it.

Each time you do this will take only ten or twenty seconds or so.  Instead of spending a long time taking many breaths this way, I suggest that you put yourself on a diet: only one breath of stillness at a time.  And then a few minutes later, another breath of stillness.  If you can remind yourself to do this regularly, you can still easily get a hundred or so stillness breaths in the course of a day.

You can view it like tasting little snacks, or like smoking cigarettes.  In fact, the appeal of smoking, for a heavy smoker, may be exactly the relative stillness that is smuggled in with each new cigarette, an excuse and reminder to just stop/shift for a few seconds.  Taking a stillness breath may be just a healthier version of lighting up.

Why not take a hundred stillness breaths and get it over with for the day, in a single session of twenty to thirty minutes?  You can try to answer this question for yourself, by trying both; one day a hundred stillness breaths spread out during the day; another day bundling them all together.  And you can then pursue whichever version you like best.

For me, these stillness breaths act like yeast, before baking bread, letting everything rise.  Just a little yeast influences all the flour around it.  Each little bit of stillness shines out over its surroundings.  And doing one at a time guarantees that it doesn't quickly become routine; it makes it harder to fall into a mechanical repetition.

But it's totally up to you how you want to explore them: one at a time, ten at a time, or hundred at a time, as you like.  There is only one thing I strongly urge you to do: that is to make notes in your journal, like in a lab notebook, for two reasons.  One is that you can later look back at what you did, and compare how your findings are affected by different times of the day or days of the week.  Another one is even more direct: the very act of writing up what happened often can give you fresh angles on what's going on, right there, on the spot.

13.3. Locating Awareness

Everything we will ever experience is given in awareness.  Anything that occurs and that we are aware of, by definition is given in awareness.  We cannot escape it or fall out of it, as little as we can fall out of space, or out of time.

Of these three, the easiest to picture is space, especially physical space.  Our bodies occupy a small part of physical space, and we can see it doing so, at least with respect to other objects.  Our thoughts can be felt to occupy a kind of mind space or thought space, but that's already a lot less straightforward to sense, to picture, or to describe.

The way our bodies and minds are given in time is harder to put our finger on.  We all have a sense of what the passing of time feels like, or so it seems.  But upon careful inspection, can we really say how we are given in time?  We can't very well stop time, to inspect it at leisure.  We can't shift forwards and backwards in time, as we can in space.

And finally, the way our presence is given in awareness is even harder to point out.  Whatever physical or mental experience we may have, whether we label it as outer or inner, objective or subjective, it is all given in awareness.  But how to picture our relationship with awareness, how to get a feel for it?

Thoughts arise in awareness.  When asked where thoughts reside, many people will point to their head.  One reason is that we consider thoughts to be associated with the way our brains function.  Another reason is that we tend to locate ourselves behind our eyes and between our ears, given that these are some of our most precise sense organs, so it is tempting to identify our own location with the vantage point of sight and sound.

However, that is not the only way to experience awareness.  When we look across the room at a chair, or when we watch a cloud outside, we are aware of chair or cloud through the visual image that we experience.  We call it a chair, or a cloud, and for practical purposes that is the right thing to do.  But a material object as such cannot possibly be put into our consciousness.  We can only experience experiences, and we can only be conscious of what is given in consciousness.  No matter how well our visual image of a chair may correspond to the physical object that we posit at the same place, we have to admit that, insofar as we experience a visual image, that image is given in our mind.

We have to conclude that our mind is everywhere!  Wherever you look, whatever you see, hear, touch, taste, smell, it is your mind or conscious experience that you encounter.  Awareness therefore is not in your head, it is everywhere, inside and outside your perceived body, near and far.  We cannot locate awareness, as little as we can locate space or time.

13.4. Letting Yourself be Seen

Here is a concrete exploration, in order to get a more vivid sense of the more theoretical ideas just outlined.  Take a single object, like a stone or a cup, or whatever object you have at hand.  Relax for a minute or more and just watch the object; let's take the example of a stone.  During that time, notice how the stone plays the passive role of the seeing interaction, and you take the active role.  You, as the subject, do the seeing, and the stone just sits there, as the object being seen.

After a while, try and see whether you can reverse the relationship.  This time, you let the stone watch you.  Or to put it differently, you let yourself be seen by the stone.  You are taking on a more passive object role, while letting the stone take the more active subject role.

Note that you are not asked to force anything: don't try to somehow imagine that `your' consciousness is transferred into the stone, or into the location of the stone, whatever that might mean.  That would be more artificial, and also that is not the point: trying to force your sense of being a subject to move to another location would still leave you the subject.  Rather, the point is to allow yourself to become more of an object, while remaining where you are.

You may object that a stone doesn't have eyes, and that you can't imagine how a stone can see you.  Try it anyway, and see what happens.  If you like to have an answer to that question, you can picture yourself to be in a fairy tale, where it is quite normal for a stone to be able to look at you.

Most likely, this simple reversal from subject to object role will change the way you feel, even physically.  Try to describe what changes in how you experience the world and yourself, as a result.  As always, good to jot down your first impressions in your journal.

You may want to do this kind of exploration a number of times, with different objects, and at different times of the day.  You can also do it outside, while walking or sitting or standing: you can pick a tree or a cloud or whatever object invites you to let it look at you.  If you try this over the period of a few days, you will begin to get some sense of the range of possibilities that this exploration can bring.

13.5. Inviting All That You Can See

While it is easiest to work with one object, initially, there is no reason to stop there.  As a next step, start by finding a comfortable place to sit, and just look in a relaxed way here and there.  Again, first notice how you, as the active subject, normally look around in order to take in all that you can observe in the form of various objects near you.  This includes other people and animals; while they are subjects for themselves, they play the role of objects for you, within your frame of observation.

Then try to reverse all the subject-object relationships that you are involved in, simultaneously.  Let all and everything that falls into your field of vision look at you, while you take a more passive object role.  The idea is to apply the same subject/object reversal as we did before, but now with everything in sight.

How does that feel?  Quite likely, the sense is yet again different from the feeling and impressions you got while doing subject/object reversal with a single object.  Please try to write your impressions down in your journal, or alternatively talk about it with a friend, so that the new experience gets more real and lasting.  If you don't do that, it's altogether possible that you will soon forget completely what you felt.

We have trained our memory and our whole cognitive apparatus throughout our lifetime to view ourselves as the subject, and chances are high that your new experiences won't fit in your memory structures, unless you put words to them, ideally on paper.  Normally, you could argue that words are less direct than immediate experience.  And of course, that is true.  But words may have the power to bridge two worlds, no matter how imperfectly, and the alternative may be that you just won't remember the world of playing-as-object, no matter how vivid it may have appeared when you did the reversal.

13.6. Inviting the World

After having done this for a while, there are quite a few ways in which you can extend the exploration.  One next step would be to let everything around you look at you.  If you sit inside a room, how about letting the wall behind you look at you?  Probably this will chance your perceptive of yourself and your surroundings significantly.  You may well feel physically different, becoming more aware of the feelings in your back, for example.

How about letting the ceiling look at you, and the ground as well?  When you are outside, you can let the whole sky look at you, the clouds, the raindrops if it rains, the blue vault of the sky if it is clear.  Without excluding anything, let everything look at you, from all directions of the compass, and from whatever is above or below you.

Initially you can do this with whatever lies in your field of view, or would lie in your field of view when you turn around or look up or down.  But you can extend the distance in your imagination.  You can let all and anything and everybody on Earth look at you, including all that is inside the Earth.

Not to worry about the Earth not being transparent.  The fact that a stone doesn't have eyes doesn't mean that you cannot let the stone look at you.  Similarly, the fact that objects are too far away, or shielded behind other objects, doesn't need to stop you.  Just try and let yourself be seen by everything.  What happens when you try?

And if you feel up to it, you can extend your range beyond that of the Earth.  You can let the whole solar system look at you, or the whole milky way galaxy in which our sun is just one star out of many.  You can go further and let all the galaxies of the Universe look at you.  There is no limit to the kind of imaginative visualization that you can explore.  The main point is to notice how limited our usual way of dealing with objects really is, and how much we can play with other degrees of freedom.

13.7. A Reversal in Time

So far we have done our subject/object reversals in space.  Let's now try to do them in time, instead.  Imagine yourself to be somewhere tomorrow, any time and place you like.  First notice how the current you is normally the subject imagining the future you as an object, an object of your anticipation.  After a while, reverse the relationship: instead of you here and now considering the future you in anticipation, let the future you remember the current you.

Refrain from taking the active position by transporting yourself to the future, looking back at the current you.  Instead, stay in the present, but let yourself be remembered by the future you.  How does it feel, to be the object of a memory?  Don't rush.  Take your time to go into the experience.

After having done this a few times, take a break, and when you are ready, try the opposite.  This time remember where you were, a day ago.  Pick a time and remember in some detail the situation you were in at that time.  Then, let that past you anticipate the current you.  Of course, most likely that's not what you did at that time.  But even so, imagine that you would have thought about the future then, letting the you of yesterday in turn imagine what the current you would be doing.

Just as a stone doesn't need eyes to let the stone look at you, similarly, the past you doesn't need to actually have anticipated you in order to now let the current you be the object of anticipation of a previous you.  And equally, a future you does not need to actually remember you, when that time comes; you can, right now, imagine the future you remembering you nonetheless.

Try to play with this kind of temporal subject/object interplay, a number of times.  Then widen the time period.  Go back a week, a month, a year, ten years or however long you like.  Let the you in your childhood anticipate the current you.  How does it feel to be anticipated by you-when-you-were-a-child? Similar, consider a you in the future, further and further.  How does it feel to be remembered by, say, a possibly eighty year old you, or older?

13.8. A Lifetime Worth of Subject/Object Reversal

Finally, after having done these various explorations, here is a more encompassing variation.  Can you let yourself be seen by *all* the versions of you, at *all* times in your life?  Can you let all the younger you instances anticipate the current you, while also letting all the older you instances remember you, all at the same time, right now?  How does it feel, to be looked at through time, by the collective you versions that form your complete life?

Again, don't rush!  While the suggestions above take only a paragraph, a real exploration make well take many hours.  So most likely, this will give you enough fuel for exploration for quite a while.

13.9. A reversal in Time and Space

Now, if you are ready to go even further, you can take all objects and all living beings in your past, and let all of them `look' at you, across time and space.  Combining the spatial subject/object reversals that we started with, together with the temporal subject/object reversals along your particular lifeline, now let everything in your past anticipate you.  Let yourself be seen by all that ever was, living beings or inert objects, all and anything.

And for good measure, do the same with all and anything that every will be: let all of that remember you, as you are right now.  How does it feel, to sit in the focal point of attention of all that was, is, and will be, in our known Universe, and if you like, in the unknown parts of our Universe as well?

Don't worry about whether you can do this exploration, or whether you are doing it in the right way.  There is no `right' way to do this.  Each time you do it will be different, and each person will do it in a different way.  The point, rather, is that this exploration is an invitation to step out of the narrow way that we normally deal with the world around us.  Rather than taking the unquestioned central place of the lone subject in a world of objects, how about taking the position of the sole object in a world of subjects?

Chances are that it's not lonely at all, but rather that you feel a new and fresh kind of engagement and togetherness with all that was/is/will be.  Try to do all this lightly, perhaps in a cheerful fairy-tale mood.  And when it gets too much for you, feel free to stop at any time.  No reason to push yourself or to force anything.  As long as you get some sense of the near-at-hand possibilities of taking quite different angles on reality, that's already enough!

We will continue this exploration in the next chapter.  For now, whenever you feel like, you can play with these explorations, in any way you like.  Use your imagination to see what other forms of subject/object reversal you can think of, spatially, temporally, and across sense faculties, such as seeing, hearing, smelling, etc.  You can also apply subject/object reversals to thinking and feeling.  Let thoughts think you, rather than you thinking thoughts.  Let feelings feel you.  There is no limit to what you can play with in this way.  Take it lightly, and enjoy!