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| Not a rose apple, but close enough |
There's a story about the Buddah that's useful for understanding the theory behind awareness meditation.
You may, or may not know that the Buddah spent many years of travelling with a gang of pretty radical believers. They trained in extremely rigourous meditation practices intended to eradicate all desire, all ambition, all thoughts of anything that might possibly corrupt the heart or the mind. But one day on this path, he just hit a wall.
At that point, he had this childhood memory. He remembered when he was a kid and he snuck away from a big festival in his village and discovered this beautiful rose apple tree. He sat down, and sitting there under this gorgeous fragrant tree, just being, with no pressure to be anything or do anything, he remembered this pure, sweet feeling of bliss. As the story goes, this memory was the gateway to his enlightenment.
The point of this story is the tree
It's important to understand that in awareness meditation the starting point for achieving happiness is not that quiet subtle feeling of being present that we might have had when we were kids. The starting point is the big beautiful amazing tree. The starting point is being able to see that tree as our mind, right now.
The challenge is that we don't often see the spectacular beauty of our mind, and even in those rare moments that we do, we struggle to maintain that recognition.
There are good reasons for this. First we often mistrust big experiences of happiness. This may be particularly true if you've come from any background where there was childhood trauma. You might have
developed a lot of mistrust of happiness, especially big happiness, because too often big happiness meant that big unhappiness was right around the corner.
But awareness meditation invites you to consider the possibility that the kind of happiness that inevitably passes might be a different kind of happiness that we experience when we truly recognizee the power, clarity and natural wisdom of the mind.
Happiness and the causes of happiness
That said nobody is claiming this isn't a challenge. Awareness meditation does not ask or even recommend that you recognize the power of your mind, experience bliss and then try to lock into that as though your life and everyone else's lives depended on it. It's perfectly fine, and even wise, that we start with brief glimpses of that big happiness, or what is called in some buddhist traditions "fruition as the path." In other words we start with a glimpse of the happiness that is actually available to us right now, get some energy from that, but then take a break a explore the kind of step by step path that might still feel more intuitive.
The step by step path is described as using causes as the path.
We all know the step by step path of starting with a seed and planting and watching it grow. So that might be the path more commonly understood as "mindfulness." The path of relaxing into subtly pleasant feelings like, just being, or gentle curiosity, or kindness. For many of us that path feels more comfortable because society encourages us to think small, and likes us to work at things.
Imagine, however, that you're a farmer who has never seen an apple tree, and someone tries to sell you some seeds, and convince you to make room for a pretty big tree, and then plant and them and tend them and watch them for a year. That's a lot of work and diligence to expect from someone if they don't know what it is exactly that they are growing.
The risks of taking the cause as the path
If your mind is anything like my mind, it might get excited for a little while about the project of tending tiny seeds for results long into the future. But then a week or two, or a month or two, the mind remembers those seeds and then re-discovers them all dried up, because it's way into some other seed project.
So it's very important to keep coming back to this big vision of what your mind is. You don't have to lock into it. But you do need to make the space in your life for that recognition to become more intuitive, if you are going to experience the kind of sustained happiness that awareness meditation is promising you.
The great news is that you don't have to wait until some day in the future to experience that happiness. You can do that right here, right now, anytime and anywhere that you want.
