In this last meditation, we practice taking up residence in awareness itself, without choosing any object or objects to focus on in particular.
This is the very same awareness that we have been bringing to various aspects of our experience in the other formal mindfulness practices. This practice is sometimes referred to as “objectless attention,” “choiceless awareness,” or “open presence.” There is no agenda at all in terms of what we pay attention to. Of course, there’s no agenda even when we’re paying attention to objects; it’s simply being the knowing through the various sense doors, of which there are more than five, as we saw earlier.
As we’ve also seen, awareness can hold anything. It is like space. It doesn’t take up room by itself. So it can hold thoughts or feelings or sensations in the body, and these can be either painful or not painful, they can be anxiety producing or not. From the perspective of the awareness, it doesn’t matter. It is very much like a mother holding her child. No matter what the child has done, what the child has experienced, or what the child fears, the mother still holds the child with unconditional love and acceptance. Even if the child is in pain, the mother holds the child with total kindness. This in itself is comforting and healing.
In a sense, this practice embodies the present moment and the infinite because the silence itself is infinite and the stillness enduring and imperturbable. Awareness doesn’t have to do anything. It doesn’t have to make anything happen. It just sees. It just knows. And in the seeing, as we have mentioned, in the knowing of any arisings through any of the senses, in the touching of any and all thoughts in awareness, these arisings in the mind — whether they are thoughts or emotions or sensations — self-liberate, dissolve on their own. They don’t lead to anything else, they don’t capture us and pull us away, if we don’t feed them.
So we simply (although it is not so easy) and with compassion (also not always easy) hold whatever arises and recognize and know whatever arises in awareness as best we can. You don’t need to do anything. There’s no doing here. Just resting in choiceless awareness, in open presence, moment by moment by moment … and reestablishing awareness if you get lost and carried away, which of course is bound to happen, over and over and over again — nothing wrong with that. Indeed, there is beauty in the activity of the mind if we remember that it does not have to define us, that we do not have to be caught, that the contents of the mind and heart are not personal.
This practice of choiceless awareness, like all the others, is an occasion to let yourself be invited into the receptive, empty, spacious, knowing quality of awareness. It is an invitation to take up residency in awareness and dwell here in this timeless moment we call “now” that gives us another dimension of being in which to live, in which to be touched by the world, and through which to touch the world and others in their joy and in their pain, in which to come to our senses — all of them — and wake up to the actuality of who we are.