(Includes revised "I Am Awareness Exercises," Part 6)
Intention: I will know myself as a point of awareness capable of creating thoughts.
Reflection: There is awareness and love. All else comes from these two. You and I are awareness. The very essence of being itself is love. When this love and our awareness meet consciousness is created. Consciousness allows for knowing and it is in knowing that we are creators of all form and history, space and time. The universe is created in this field of knowing called consciousness. Here blissful eternity springs forth juggling galaxies, oceans and skies.
Come to know yourself as awareness, the seed of consciousness, so you can see the wonders you are creating from this love that is the ground of being. And what will you see when you come to know yourself as awareness? You will see that you are without dimension or color, weight or will, free of becoming and wanting, too small for time to find, but big enough for eternity to hold.
Knowing yourself as a point of awareness embraced by love takes time, effort, and persistence in your spiritual practice. The exercises presented here are designed to support the unfolding of this realization. Live in the joy of knowing you are more than body and desire, mind and sorrow. Any identification with memory or body, this or that, hides your truth. They are expressions of you, but not your essence. That is awareness and awareness alone. Remain free. Anything you can imagine yourself to be is less than you are. Phrases like "I am this" or "I am that" are the stuff attachments are made of. They hide your radiance from yourself and others.
We need to move beneath the personality to the consciousness creating it and then go deeper still to pure awareness. How can this be done? Our exercises are one way. They support your realization in four important ways: acclimating your listening to silence, your eye to emptiness, your attention to the present moment, and your heart to acts of caring and compassion. Here in the silent emptiness of the present moment you can best reflect the love found in the essence of all that is. Here attachments fall away and your beauty can be realized.
Realizing you are awareness is important for another reason. When we are pure awareness, we are what we perceive or know. What more could awareness be? Whatever we are aware of we instantly become. Such is our life as pure awareness. Here being and knowing are one and same. This very fact brings us into the world of the mystical where poetry and logic begin to dance, whirling round and round one another. Since being and knowing are one and the same for us as pure awareness, then the act of being aware of love makes us love, being aware of bliss makes us bliss. Come back to this truth often.
Can you see how important it is to settle for nothing less than knowing yourself as a point of awareness? You will become the blessing and inspiration needed, the face of love longed for, the light that appears in the darkest corner for the turned down eye. Yes, continue with the spiritual practice of these exercises not only for yourself, but for all of us.
Revised "I Am Awareness Exercises", Part 6
Meditation: In this meditation we will shift our focus away from the content of our thoughts and move it to creation of thoughts and to ourselves as the thought creator. Become conscious of the location of yourself in the area of the frontal lobe, just behind the center of your high forehead.
Now think "I am." You created that thought. Close your eyes for a moment as you imagine looking around inside your head. See the location where the thought occurs. Repeat the phrase "I am" and watch the thought coming into being. See the letter "I" appear each time you think it and then shift your focus to the instant before the letter "I" appeared. What was there? It came out of somewhere. It appeared at a certain point of time. See the emptiness from where the "I" emerged. Experience the emptiness and silence there the instant before the "I" appeared.
Now visualize the letters of the word "am" coming out from this silent point of awareness. See the letter "a" appear and then the letter "m." Continue to look at the thought you have created out of nothing - "I am."
This is you in the act of creation - a point of silent, creative, still awareness in the eternity of the present moment, creating thoughts out of nothing.
Inquiry: And what can you say about yourself as the thinker, the thought generator? We experienced awareness initiating the use of our brain to create thoughts. What attributes do you have as a thinker? Any form or size? Emotions? Memory? Can you begin to know yourself as the thinker using memory? Are you the thoughts? Or are you simply the thinker generating the thoughts?
Active Meditation: As you come to know yourself more and more as a point of awareness in a universe of compassion beyond your personality, you can begin to take your personality's pet peeves and whims, likes and dislikes, less seriously. Much of the joy of life, especially in relationships, is robbed by the excessive demands of our personality for power and control, for appreciation and recognition. Please note I am talking about the excessive demands and not for a healthy amount of power and control, appreciation and recognition we all want and should create and expect in our life and our relationships in particular. I want you to listen for the whining, pouting, jealous, and demanding aspects of your personality. Listen for those aspects of your personality that are self-centered, selfish, and addictive, the ones sabotaging your capability to love, to find fulfillment and happiness. When they kick into action, triggered by some event or comment, you can weaken their hold on your attention. Give yourself some emotional distance from these aspects of your personality by taking a more distant and objective view of them. Don't identify with them, but instead review them with the emotional distance of an observer or witness reviewing. Be a point of awareness reviewing your psyche. This is not just a trick we are playing on our psyche, but rather a practice that supports our growing into the truth that we are awareness using a body, mind and personality. We all have these buttons in our personalities which when pushed lead to emotional turmoil. When this happens to you, return to the thought that you are not your personality. Remember, your personality, at best, is a set of behaviors patterns for different social situations and roles, with associated values, and desires. When those patterns support being loving and compassionate they lead to fulfillment and happiness. If they don't then we work to change them. We don't have to take our feelings so seriously that we act on all of them. Look at them and then decide if it is in your best interest to follow their lead. These personality patterns aren't you, but simply a vehicle you use to express who you are. And who are you? - A point of awareness experiencing and expressing the blissful love of being.
Silence: Let's continue with our silence exercise. As our identity shifts from being a personality to being awareness, we find our self more and more in the present moment. Released somewhat from the excessive demands of the personality for security, power and attention you will find yourself in a quieter, more peaceful, recollected state. When we identify with our personality on an ultimate level our attachment to our inner dialogue is intense, affording little peace, making quiet meditation next to impossible. But as we come to know our self as awareness beneath and beyond the personality, our attachment to its excessive demands lessens. The inner dialogue becomes less interesting. We are able to more easily return to the present moment. Here we find silence waiting for us. We begin to see that the real effort is not to be silent, but rather the exhaustive effort of making constant noise and maintaining this continuous stream of inner chatter. Silence is already all around you and within you. There is so much more silence than noise. Take a break from the work of your personality for just a few moments. Let it go. Just follow your breath. Breath in slowly, hold for a moment and then breath out slowly and hold for a moment. Then begin again, replacing the noise and action of being a personality with the stillness and silence of the present moment.
Service: When you interact with others this week practice moments of meeting them on the level of awareness meeting awareness. You might imagine this meeting as feeling or an energy moving between the two of you from one heart to the other. Allow the talk to go on above as usual, words moving back and forth. You stay below, secretly meeting on a level of intimacy only found when awareness meets awareness in silence. Here is the place where new loves and old friendships grow stronger.
Intention Renewal: Allow the intention of this meditation to continue. I will know myself as a point of awareness capable of creating thoughts. Give this intention permission to grow and strengthen in your life.