Awareness cont'd

The reason for talking about the body and how it is nothing more than an organic mass is to convery the fact that you are not your body. Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj often told the people who came to hear him talk to understand that fact. At his home in India on June 19, 1981 he told his followers, "You are not your body, you are the consciousness. There is no imprint of personality, it is the manifest consciousness. The very idea that you are the body is ridiculous: the consciousness is experiencing its manifestation. A rare being will realize this."

To know you are not the body all you have to do is sit in quiet mindful meditation and watch your thoughts. Get in the most comfortable position possible so you won't be disturbed by anything causing your body to ache. Focus all of your attention on your breathing and stay there. When thoughts come up simply notice them and let them go. Do not judge the thoughts. Each time a thought appears bring your attention back to your breathing. This is all your do. If you want to, you can set a timer for your meditation period. I like to do 60 minutes. You can set the timer for any length that suits you. The longer you sit the more thoughts you will have and the more thoughts you have the greater the opportunity for larger and larger gaps between thoughts. That's what you want - gaps between thoughts. When you are in a gap there are no thoughts, and if there are no thoughts there is no consciousness. If there is no consciousness, there is no body. The gap period is the experience of the Absolute.

A few posts back I talked about having the sense of presence. Presence is the energy that runs through the body and gives you that sense of being. The sense of being is not the body but the feeling of the energy within and without the body. When you are doing mindful meditation, discussed above, you will probably have the sense of presence. It is a very delightful feeling.

Another interesting thing about being in awareness is you can actually be aware of judging. It has to do with the ability to obsere things and events with impartiality and non-judgment. It is an acceptance of whatever is happening in your experience, whether it is "good" or "bad." This means staying with the experience and allowing it to yield its meaning to you. This includes being impartial of being judgmental - being aware of judging. This is being truly "objective" to your experiences in the best possible sense.

The next post I will give you an example of what I'm talking about.