The activities of
seeking and resisting are an inevitable expression of the sense of lack or
suffering that underlies them.
We become addicted
to the endless cycle of lack, seeking and temporary fulfillment that
characterizes most people's lives.
Happiness is not a
temporary experience that alternates with unhappiness. It is not the opposite
of unhappiness, any more than the blue sky is the opposite of the clouds. Just as the clouds are the veiling of the blue
sky, so unhappiness is the veiling of happiness.
The known always
changes; knowing never changes.
All there is to
thought is thinking, and all there is to thinking is knowing.
In the form of the
mind, awareness moves without moving.
Most of us are so
fascinated by the content of experience -- thoughts, images, feelings,
sensations and perceptions -- that we overlook the knowing with which all
knowledge and experience are known.
Awareness cannot be
discovered; it can only be recognized.
Mind is the
self-colouring activity of awareness.
Meditation is the fading or dissolving of this self-colouring activity
and the subsequent revelation of the colourless essence of the mind, pure
awareness itself.
It is not because
awareness is so far that it seems to be unknown or missing; it is because it is
so close. It is closer than close. If someone were to ask us, relatively speaking,
to stand up and take a step towards ourself, in which direction would we turn?
Mind is the activity
through which and as which awareness knows objective experience. Therefore, in awareness's knowledge of itself
-- being aware of being aware -- there is no need or room for any movement or
activity of the mind.
If we are suffering
we are, by definition, seeking.
Doing nothing is not
an option for one who considers himself to be a separate self.
For most people,
meditation, self-enquiry or contemplative prayer will seem, at least initially,
to be an activity that they as a separate self practice, and only gradually, as
their understanding matures and their practice is redefined, will self-enquiry
give way to self-abidance, self-resting or self-surrender.
Meditation is what
we are, not what we do.
The separate self or
finite mind is what we do, not what we are.
The finite mind is
not an entity in its own right. It has
no existence of its own. It is the
activity that awareness assumes in order to know objective knowledge and
experience.
