Become aware of your presence in the room you are in.
You are already in that room,
All we are doing is becoming aware of it.
If you catch yourself thinking,
Become aware of this presence of yours.
Who is thinking?
The same way we are becoming aware of where we are in the room or that we are in the room,
Become aware of you thinking.
Not what you are thinking of,
But your presence that is thinking.
It's quite natural to be engrossed and lost in what we are experiencing,
Be it the sense perceptions of sights,
Sounds,
Tastes,
Textures,
Smells or feelings and sensations and thoughts.
But today,
We are going to use these eight modalities,
Five sense perceptions,
Thoughts,
Feelings and sensations as a bridge to get to you.
And the prerequisite for that to happen is your utter disinterest in the specificity of these eight modalities.
So if your eyes are closed,
Great,
Your modality is already taken care of.
My words after a certain point will be white noise.
Hopefully there are no strong smells in your room.
The chair is comfortable so there is no novelty in the textures.
And you are not eating anything,
So there is no question of tastes.
If you are relatively pain-free and sitting comfortably,
Sensations are not your nemesis either.
And if it's a relatively average day,
Your feelings are somewhat neutral.
Our biggest nemesis might be our thoughts that are dangling,
Luring,
Magnetically pulling us in.
But we can decide to be disinterested in them for the next 20-25 minutes.
And notice I said disinterested.
I'm not saying we should stop what is happening in these eight modalities,
Let them come.
If thoughts come,
No problem.
When we are disinterested,
We don't have a problem with that happening.
Sure,
Whatever,
You know,
That's the attitude.
But we are going to take one extra step of using that to become aware of yourself.
You can't be thinking without you being present.
And today's meditation is about you,
Not about your thoughts,
Not about my words,
Not about your feelings either.
We live our entire life,
Moment by moment,
Hour by hour,
Day,
Week,
Month,
Year,
Decade,
Focusing outside on these eight modalities.
And if we practice,
We might be aware and mindful of those eight modalities,
Specifics,
Minutia,
We might even know the patterns.
But we leave a very important thing out.
Even if we are aware and mindful of those things,
We leave ourselves out.
So we are practicing self-awareness and the steps that we can retrace when we are alone by ourselves.
Without demonizing these eight modalities,
Without demonizing the thoughts and the sounds and the noises that might be around you,
We are using them instead of rejecting them.
Using them to come to ourselves.
The beauty of this bridge is that once we come on this side,
On our side,
That bridge and what it was connecting us to collapses,
Disappears.
If I ask you to come back to yourself from these sounds,
There is a sort of distance that gets created first and then the sound just fades away because you are floating on the island of you.
So try it with your thoughts and see what happens to your thoughts when you come back to yourself.
Every time we say I,
We refer to ourselves,
But because we don't know ourselves,
We don't step on this island.
The color,
The diversity,
The sounds of the external,
Of those eight modalities are so enamoring that this quiet island is just missed.
The society,
The culture has made us so interested in what is happening outside,
In learning,
In engaging that we have forgotten ourselves.
Or maybe even dismissed as what's there to know and what's there to explore in myself.
Being able to walk this bridge backward all the way to yourself consciously is one of the most satisfying experiences that we can have.
Most profound experiences that we can have.
In all the pauses that I'm taking,
If like a rabbit you can go back into your hole,
Go back on this island as if you come out only to here and then you go back,
You will be introduced to yourself as the referent of I.
If you're feeling discomfort,
That's normal.
If you're feeling restless,
That's normal too.
It's the unfamiliarity of being with ourselves.
This is the ultimate level of intimacy that we can experience.
Not being in the company of anything else,
Just yourself.
If thinking is bothering you again,
A half step is to become aware of your self-thinking and then come back to yourself.
What I have to say is not important at all.
Experiencing this intimacy with yourself,
That's something.
No agenda,
No desire,
No motives.
I guess that's what we call love.
You don't have to learn anything.
You don't have to become anyone.
You don't have to improve.
You don't have to fix.
This intimacy,
This love is all accommodating.
We just have to be here,
Be ourselves,
With ourselves,
Without being interested in anything else.
Not even our most intimate thoughts and feelings,
They are still a distraction.
This is the ultimate self-awareness.
Aware of yourself.
And it's effortless.
Thank you.
