Falling Awake by Jon Kabat-Zinn

Author:Jon Kabat-Zinn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2018-08-06T16:00:00+00:00

And then there is the practice of choiceless awareness.

Given that the field of awareness we have been cultivating through the various practices described above is fundamentally limitless by nature, we can expand our awareness still further, beyond even attending specifically to the stream of our own thoughts and emotions arising and passing away in each moment. We can, instead, allow the field of awareness to be essentially infinite, boundless, like space itself, or like the sky, noting that it can include any and all aspects of our experience, interior and exterior, sensory, perceptual, somatic, emotional, cognitive as primary objects of attention, and that we can rest in this vast, sky-like field of awareness without choosing among or specifically featuring any of these particular occurrences. Instead, we allow them all to come and go, appear and disappear, as they will, and be known in their fullness from moment to moment within the nowscape.

This is the practice of what Krishnamurti called choiceless awareness, akin to the practice of shikan-taza, or “just sitting—nothing more” in Zen, and to Dzogchen in the Tibetan tradition. The Buddha called it the themeless concentration of awareness. The mind itself, once cultivated in this way, has the ability instantly to know and recognize what is arising, whatever it is, as it is arising, and instantly discern its true nature. With the arising, it is known non-conceptually by the mind itself, as if the sky knew the birds and the clouds and the moonlight within it. And in that knowing, with no attachment, no aversion, in that knowing in this very moment of now, the event, the sensation, the memory, the thought bubble in the stream, the feeling of hurt or sadness, or anger, or joy “self-liberates,” as the Tibetans like to say, like touching a soap bubble, but with the mind, or, put differently, dissipates naturally in the knowing, like “writing on water.”

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