In the same way that there's wrong mindfulness,
There is a pseudo awareness experience,
Which looks like it might be the experience of awareness,
But it's just you watching yourself,
Quietly.
Yeah?
It's deeper than that.
It's about learning to recognize a different aspect of you.
It is not this witnessing presence.
It's deeper than that.
It's not active in our ordinary state,
It's passive.
You will not bring online,
Switch on this way of abiding or this way of attention,
No matter how much you refine the qualities of your ordinary mind.
It's not going on in your mind.
It's like there's music,
It's playing on the radio,
But you're trying to smell what the roast beef is like.
You can't get it through the radio.
Do you understand what I'm saying?
Stop trying to understand what I'm explaining to you,
Because somewhere inside you,
You've been having that experience,
But it's just so crowded out by your mind.
You know,
You've had this experience countless times when you are resting in the morning,
You wake up and you doze back to sleep and there's a clarity and a peace that comes on you that's not dreaming,
Your mind's not active.
Or sometimes because of concentration,
You stop attending to everything so that when you emerge from your meditation,
You're walking out around the place,
You feel something,
A deeper sense of presence.
But that,
Watching it,
Isn't it?
The words that I use is this resting effortlessly within,
Within the experience,
Part of it.
It's no I am,
If I'm anything,
I'm the experience.
Because in principle,
You're doing nothing.
The practice is learning to leave everything completely alone,
To stop attending to.
Some of you have a terribly difficult time leaving things alone.
Some of you are registering what I'm trying to convey and some of you are fiercely thinking about it,
Putting it into your spreadsheet.
Watch yourself adding and stop.
That's it,
I can't really say very much,
Can I?
I can only make little hints and you can keep carrying on doing absolutely nothing and not disturbing the process.
Wonderful.
So I'll just give you a little exercise.
This one is through the breath.
Okay,
So let's just try this and see where it leads us.
Let's do our meditation.
So relax back into your posture,
Come back to your state of natural rest,
Non-doing.
The attitude of grasping in the mind is pervasive,
Deeply ingrained in us.
Our sense that we have to grasp at our experience or cling to what's happening is deeply rooted.
Our ability to leave things completely alone is something we have to develop.
Coming to a state of rest and staying there,
Undisturbed and without disturbing,
Is something we have to practice.
We have to let go our perceived need to take from the experience,
Our need for more.
Bring your attention to your breath,
Breathe naturally,
Through your mouth or through your nose,
It doesn't matter as long as you are not controlling your breath.
Breathe in such a way that you are not accumulating tension,
That each out-breath is a complete letting go.
Recognize if there is a reservation or resistance to letting go,
A tendency to hold on to what you've just taken on,
An inability to completely relax into your out-breath.
Just spend a few moments attuning without watching,
Just resting with your breath as it arises naturally.
Relaxing into it and allowing your out-breath to come back to you.
Recognize this naturally,
Relaxing into it and allowing your out-breath to prompt or to encourage a deeper letting go of any layers of tension within you.
So you follow the out-breath to the point at which it fades away completely.
And as your out-breath comes to an end,
Just prompt yourself,
Encourage yourself,
Allow yourself to stay in that empty stillness and for a moment resist the instinctual urge to take more by breathing in again.
Explore that empty stillness.
Initially you might need to resist the urge to breathe in,
But as you relax into it,
You'll see that you do not need to breathe in and that a space can open up.
You may need to let go some layers of anxiety or restlessness or craving to surrender totally to the empty pause at the end of your out-breath.
Although you are actually experiencing your breath,
It also becomes a metaphor.
The in-breath is that I need more and the out-breath is I don't want.
It's done.
It's the letting go what is used up.
But what if you were to come to the end of your out-breath and you didn't need more?
If that moment was enough,
That urge to breathe in instantly would fade.
Come to rest in that stillness that remains.
You don't stop yourself from breathing.
You allow your body to breathe,
But you open yourself into that empty pause at the end of each out-breath.
Explore it,
Rest in it,
Add nothing to it.
Just surrender to it.
Explore it,
Rest in it,
Add nothing to it.
Just surrender to it.
See your breath is nothing more than a momentary fluctuation.
In that stillness that pervades behind one breath and the next and the next and the next.
As your breath comes and goes that stillness remains.
So you in the same way that your breath is not still but arising out of stillness and passing away into it.
Your body though mountain-like does not need to be still,
To be deeply at rest,
To be deeply at rest,
Emerging out of stillness,
Within the stillness.
Let go the watcher and just rest.
Tune into the stillness around you,
Rest.
There is nothing to add.
Awareness remains.
Rest.
All experience,
Pleasure and pain,
Suffering and liberation,
All experience arises within the basic ground of awareness.
That basic ground is not disturbed.
There is nothing to add.
Your mind is just one of the myriad things arising and passing endlessly within the vast spacious ground of awareness.
There is nothing to add.
Leave everything as it is.
So may all beings be happy.
May all beings be happy.
May all beings be happy.
May all beings be happy.
May all beings be happy.
