Our small sangha seems to have the ability to put their finger on really important questions. Last week one member said that when they tried to shift their attention from being caught up in their thoughts and emotions to the spacious awareness in which these were happening, they then felt fear. It was as if this shift threatened their identity - who were they if they were not their thoughts and emotions, surely these were what made them who they were?
This is a great, if initially alarming, observation. Here I could go into the whole Buddhist thing of the absence of an unchanging and seperate self and how clinging to a sense of me and mine is the cause of suffering etc. etc., but I don’t think this will really help. While it would be an accurate Buddhist response it somehow misses what is at the back of this question which is (I suspect) about what is the place of our humanity. It’s all very well hanging out in a lovely spacious awareness but does this not seem a bit cold, a bit distant or detached from the things that make our lives valuable - our family and friends, mutual caring, relationships, love.
In my experience this is not the case. One of the things that seems to be a hall mark of a deepening experience of this practice is that as we contract less around experiences of fear the heart naturally opens. Awareness is not a place of absence of feeling, a kind of empty void where nothing matters anymore in the sense that we no longer care. Rather it is a vibrant and alive space which is full of every experience we are capable of having. Within it all human emotions arise and dissolve. Feelings of love and hate, delight and pain, confidence and fear. What is different is that when resting in this spacious awareness it allows us to be braver, less defensive towards those parts of our experience we have previously been afraid or ashamed of. Now, a kind of transparency pervades them all. As our identification recedes the contents of our mind becomes less dense, concrete, no longer so compelling. Being with ourselves is just easier, we need not be draw back from who we are.
In the Tibetan tradition of Dzogchen this state of non-dual awareness is described as an indivisible and limitless expanse of emptiness and clarity. What is interesting for us here is that the Tibetan word for this limitless expance, tukje, conveys two meanings. Firstly it means how within spacious awareness the whole universe manifests - nothing is outside of or beyond awareness, awareness is the source that contains every experience. However, the second meaning is compassion, so what is also being said is that the true nature of the manifest universe, every human experience, when free of the obscurations of grasping, hatred and delusion, is revealed to be compassion. Not a cold or aloof detachment but a place of deep caring, of love. Furthermore, as our ability to rest in awareness increases, so this inherent love becomes more evident and accessible. It all gets warmer and warmer.
So what about the fear of losing who we are, of becoming less than human? Well, it seems that while this is a real fear, it does not relate to anything real. Our humanity is in fact increased and we can feel more and more. Resting in spacious awareness for a moment or two when we have never experienced it before may feel a bit odd and this feeling of oddness may trigger an anxiety that is then solidified by lots of thoughts. But if we continue and persist, like a new haircut, it soon becomes a familiar and pleasing experience. And, rather than wanting to quickly retreat back into the familiar, the feeling of curiosity emerges - what would it be like if I could rest here all the time?
NW. 5 December 2023
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