Today I did a two hour practice. I've been falling a little behind on my one hour practices of late, but I went to retreat last Sunday, which has given me much food for meditation.
In one of his introductory lectures, Mingyur Rinpoche talks about the three levels of awareness: ordinary awareness, awareness of awareness, and pure awareness. When I first started meditating all I wanted, and all I aimed for was pure awareness. I wanted that wonderful, pristine, perfect free from all suffering bliss. I often got there our of sheer beginner fanaticism. Like many mediators in the first stages of practice I thought of ordinary awareness, and awareness of awareness as stages to surmounted until I reached the pure place free of all suffering forever and ever.
One of the biggest barriers to progress, I think, has been my contempt for the other kinds of awareness, as though they are "lower" stages of evolution. When I found myself being driven by ordinary awareness, I would get frustrated and angry with myself. Shouldn't I be past this by now? Shouldn't I be master of my awareness after all these years of practice.
More and more, though, I am building a certain affection for these states of being. The goal of practice in not necessarily pure awareness, so much as stability of awareness. Simply being conscious of which state of awareness you are in lays the ground for more spontaneous arisings of pure awareness. If I catch myself in ordinary awareness, I don't get irritated or discouraged, I just notice that it's ordinary awareness. In the noticing I am immediately in stage too, awareness of awareness. The trick is to bring stage two into a place of self-awareness, not self-consciousness. Most people, myself included, really hate this place where all we seem to be doing is noticing the thoughts, the tensions, the memories. The suffering.
But freedom from suffering is not freedom from pain. The Dalai Lama is free of much suffering, but when I saw him in Montreal a few years back, he'd just had an appendectomy. He obviously still felt pain, and took that pain seriously enough to have necessary surgery. Suffering, as Shinzen Young has so brilliantly defined it, is resistance to pain. Because of our ingrained resistance to pain, we are often resistance to the pure pleasures of existence that are available to us whenever we want.
In recent weeks I've been falling asleep to guided loving kindness meditations. For the next while I've decided that I will direct loving kindness mostly to different levels of myself. I will feel the natural love I feel for those parts of myself, which I like, my natural intelligence and openness. I will feel the more directed love I need to feel for the more neutral parts of myself that I often neglect to validate. The part of myself that does the dishes more often than not. The part of myself that shops for the basics and keeps my butt sitting in front of the computer so that I can generate some writing every day. And I will take those more naturally arising feelings of love and gratitude and direct them towards the most difficult aspects of my personality. My messiness, my self-delusion, my tendency towards resentment and reactivity. The anger that I continue to feel towards my family, despite my best intentions.
And then, here's the hard part. Once I've felt this recursive love towards myself, I will then direct this love towards the world. Towards all people who have, but don't recognize their natural kindness. Towards all people, and there are so many, whose minds are dragging them back into patterns of suffering that they feel powerless over.
We all want safety, happiness, health and ease. We all forget several thousand times a day that we have this wonderful permanent nature that is safe, happy, healthy and easily available every time we choose to recognize it. As safe and as permanent as a mountain, as happy, strong and full as the ocean, and as easy and inevitable as gravity.
