AWARENESS AND QUIET ARE THE MOST INTIMATE AND OBVIOUS CHARACTERISTICS OF CONSCIOUSNESS.
Meditating is the core practice of most esoteric or inner forms of spirituality. Meditation in the way I use it is for waking up—“waking up” meaning the revelation of our true nature of what we are. But meditation can serve many different functions: it can relax you, it is good for your health, and it is especially good for your brain. You would think that we would give more attention to our mental, psychological, emotional, and spiritual hygiene. We have a hygiene for everything else—we brush our teeth, we keep our bodies clean, we keep our clothes clean, we straighten up our houses, and we take care of our cars. We give more attention to many of the inanimate objects in our life than we do to the well-being of our spirit, which makes us feel inspired and buoyant and gives us a direct sense and feel of the sacred and the timeless.
Whether one is spiritual or religious or not, we are all drawn to the sacred—a connection with a mysterious quality that lurks below the surface of our normal conscious attention. It is not that we need to go search for the sacred in the sense that it is hiding somewhere. The sacred is not hidden; it is the ground in which our whole life takes place, this ground of great significance, this feeling of meaning—not necessarily the definition of what that meaning might be, but the feeling of it—and the feeling of something profound and mysterious. This is what meditation, the art of deep inner listening, makes available to us.
When I teach meditation, I stress not only what we are doing but also the assumptions we bring to the simple practice of listening. We can view meditation as a form of spiritual seeking, of looking for something that we think we lack, or of trying to complete ourselves somehow, but meditation begins with the acknowledgment of what is already present, instead of the search for what is not or what we imagine is not present. One of the things I advise people to do when they sit down to meditate is to ask themselves a question: Is it true that the peace, stillness, and quiet I am about to look for are not already present here and now?
In those few seconds after you ask the question, if you are in a state of listening and of letting something other than a thought answer, your body and your consciousness can sense that there is a preexisting state of quiet and peace and that awareness itself is already present. Your mind may not be able to understand awareness, as it may not be able to grasp it, define it, see it, or touch it, but the mere fact that you can (for instance) hear someone’s voice is possible only because of the preexisting state of awareness that is functioning right now. Just asking the question draws attention to this preexisting state of quiet, peace, and ease; it drives our attention spontaneously and intuitively to the awareness that is in the background of every experience.
That is why I call meditation “the art of listening”—listening, not with your mind or your ears, but with your entire being. Our whole bodies—physical body and subtle body—are extraordinarily sensitive living organisms, and these are what we use in meditation. I see meditation not only as the art of deep listening but also as the art of acknowledging what is always and already present. If we do not in some way acknowledge what is present, then we will try to seek or produce what we imagine not to be present. We must stop looking for something and chasing after something, even if that something is silence, stillness of mind, and peace. We must stop looking for these things as if they are absent from our current experience; they are the foundation of our current experience.
This form of meditation can be a radical shift from the way a lot of people meditate. It was for me. It took me by surprise when I finally noticed that much of what I was looking for in my meditation was already present before I began to meditate. I cannot quite convey the feeling when I sat down one day to meditate and observed that even before I was trying to be aware, awareness was already present, and that before I tried to settle in and be peaceful and still, there was already a state of peace and a sense of stillness. I realized that a lot of the qualities I was seeking in meditation were already present, and it was a shock. It was as if I had been poor my whole life and one day I put my hands in my pockets to find that they were full of money. I was a millionaire! I had assumed that I was poor and therefore never checked my pockets. I was trying to acquire money from the outside, but little did I know I already had it.
This is part of the meditation that I teach: acknowledgment of what is present instead of seeking what we imagine not to be present. That is a big difference from the way most folks meditate. It also addresses one of the reasons that so many people find meditation frustrating: their minds seem to be so busy, and they have difficulty settling down and listening. However, if we start with acknowledging that yes, awareness is already present, there is a sense of quiet or peace before we even look for it. It is as if these qualities are already the background of our conscious experience, but we are so caught up in doing that we never notice. Part of the doing we can be caught up in is active meditation itself, so that meditation becomes another form of looking for something and of trying to satisfy the relentlessly unfulfilled ego mind.
Awareness is present even if your mind is chatting away. In the same way that my voice produces sound, the thoughts in your mind produce an inner sound, but they happen within the quiet of awareness. Take a moment to feel that, to sense into it, and to listen to that background quiet. This awareness of quiet may be fleeting before your attention wanders, and that is okay; even when your attention wanders, there is still awareness that thought is happening within awareness and within consciousness—because if it was not, you would not even know that there was a thought.
Meditation is not the art of not thinking—that is a mistake about meditation that is made most of the time. It is the art of listening to that which already is not thinking, which is the space in which thoughts occur and the silence in which the noise of the mind chats to itself. So instead of trying to control your mind, to make it quiet or to make it think one thought, meditation makes thought irrelevant. It is another noise, and even when that noise of the mind is happening, it is happening within a quiet awareness or consciousness.
Awareness and quiet are the most intimate and obvious characteristics of consciousness. We are well served by acknowledging and noticing what is present rather than constantly searching for what is not. What is always and already present is always and already present, which means it is not apart from you, it is not other than you, and it is not something that is not now and always and already happening. When we are looking for something we imagine not to be here, that we imagine to be missing, the mind is talking to itself about what it thinks it needs to do. A mind that says, “I must quiet my mind” is still a noisy mind, and a mind that says, “I am not good at this” is a noisy mind. Notice how awareness is not battling with your mind. It is only the mind that battles with the mind, and it is only the mind that battles with how you feel, but even that battle is something that occurs within awareness.
It is more useful and certainly easier to think of meditation as the art of acknowledging what is already present. This can happen when you are sitting in meditation, which is great, but you can also do it at any time. It takes only a few seconds to notice that awareness and quiet are always and already the background of every experience. Start with little moments of meditation—ten seconds, fifteen seconds—and repeat them during the day. Gradually do nothing but this acknowledgment practice for two, ten, twenty, twenty-five seconds—whatever—but do not turn it into a battle, and do not turn it into something that is frustrating or makes you feel defeated. These small moments of meditation can change what you are noticing. In a certain sense, you will be changing your consciousness, opening and beginning to observe and feel and sense into—become sensitive to—the sacred and the timeless. It may or may not start out that way the first time you do it, but the sacred and the timeless are always and already present. All we need to do is take a moment to notice, and that is what meditation is.