True Refuge: Finding Peace and Freedom in Your Own Awakened Heart (30 page)

Ananda, the Buddha's most devoted disciple, served and accompanied the Buddha for many years. Through all this time, he worked strenuously at becoming enlightened. He practiced meditation, was impeccable in his generosity, wise in speech, good in heart. Yet after the Buddha's death, when a great council of enlightened monks was planned, Ananda was not entitled to attend. While honored as deeply kind and wise, he had not yet attained inner freedom.

On the eve of the council meeting, Ananda vowed to practice vigorously all night and not stop until he attained his goal. But in spite of his heroic efforts, he made no progress. Toward dawn, exhausted and discouraged, he decided to let go of striving and simply relax. In that state, attentive yet with no clinging to attainment, he rested his head on the pillow—and became liberated.

Of course, the recipe for freedom is not simply lying back and resting. It's important to remember that Ananda had devoted decades to serving others and to cultivating a lucid, mindful awareness. He was dedicated to realizing truth. Yet, like many of us, he had hooked his mind and heart to a goal. He had to unhook, to stop “doing” entirely, to realize the freedom of his true nature.

Learning to Unhook: Training in Open Awareness

Tibetan teacher Chögyam Trungpa once opened a class by drawing a
V
on a large white sheet of poster paper. He then asked those present what he had drawn. Most responded that it was a bird. “No,” he told them. “It's the sky with a bird flying through it.”

How we pay attention determines our experience. When we are in doing or controlling mode, our attention narrows and we perceive objects in the foreground—the bird, a thought, a strong feeling. In these moments we don't perceive the sky—the background of experience, the ocean of awareness. The good news is that we can intentionally incline our minds toward not controlling and toward an open attention.

My formal introduction to open awareness was through dzogchen—a Tibetan Buddhist practice. Until then, I had trained in concentration and mindfulness, always focusing on an object (or changing objects) of attention. In dzogchen, as taught by my teacher Tsoknyi Rinpoche, we repeatedly let go of whatever our attention fixates on and turn toward the awareness that is attending. The invitation is to recognize the skylike quality of the mind—the empty, open, wakefulness of awareness—and
be
that.

My first retreat with Tsoknyi Rinpoche loosened my moorings in a wonderful way. The more I became familiar with the presence of awareness, the weaker the foothold was for the feelings and stories that sustained my sense of self. Tensions in my body and mind untangled themselves, and my heart responded tenderly to whoever or whatever came to mind. I left that retreat, and later dzogchen retreats, feeling quite spacious and free.

I recently learned of the work of Les Fehmi, a psychologist and researcher who for decades has been clinically documenting the profound healing that arises from resting in open awareness. In the 1960s researchers began to correlate synchronous alpha brain waves with profound states of well-being, peace, and happiness. Fehmi, an early and groundbreaking leader in this research, sought strategies that might deepen and amplify alpha waves. Experimenting with student volunteers, he tracked their EEG readings as they visualized peaceful landscapes, listened to music, watched colored lights, or inhaled various scents. But it was only after he posed the question, “Can you imagine the space between your eyes?” that their alpha wave levels truly soared. He posed another: “Can you imagine the space between your ears?” The subjects' alpha waves spiked again. Further experimentation confirmed the effects of what Fehmi termed “open focused attention.” The key was inviting attention to space (or stillness or silence or timelessness) and shifting to a nonobjective focus.

Narrowly focused attention affects our entire body-mind. Whenever we fixate on making plans, on our next meal, on judgments, on a looming deadline, our narrowed focus produces faster (beta) waves in the brain. Our muscles tense, and the stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline are released. While necessary for certain tasks, as an ongoing state this stress constellation keeps us from full health, openheartedness, and mental clarity.

In contrast, open-focused attention rests the brain. With a sustained pause from processing information—from memories, plans, thoughts about self—brain waves slow down into synchronous alpha. Our muscles relax, stress hormone levels are lowered, blood flow is redistributed. No longer in fight-or-flight reactivity, our body and mind become wakeful, sensitive, open, and at ease.

You may have noticed the effect of open awareness when looking at the night sky and sensing its immensity. Or during the silence in the early morning before sunrise. Or when the world is still after a snowfall. We resonate with such moments because they connect us with the most intimate sense of what we are. We sense the depth of our being in the night sky, the mystery of what we are in the silence, the stillness. In these moments of objectless awareness there's a wordless homecoming, a realization of pure being.

Exploring Inner Space

My awareness of inner space came alive when I took my son, Narayan, to an IMAX film called
Cosmic Voyage
. We were catapulted out into space, first through our solar system and the Milky Way, and then in stages to the outer edges of the observable universe.

To get a sense of scale, light from Andromeda, the galaxy closest to our own, takes 2.4 million years to reach us. When we see it, the light has been rushing toward us at 186,000 miles a second for 2.4 million years. And beyond our galactic neighborhood lie an estimated 80 billion more galaxies, unimaginably far way.

Then the film took us back to earth, and through a drop of water, the cosmic zoom was reversed. We descended through ever diminishing realms to the tiniest known particle, a quark.

We know outer space is vast and mostly empty, but we usually consider our familiar world as more solid. Yet the atoms that make up our own bodies are actually 99.99 percent empty space. The space between atoms, and the space within atoms, compared to their mass makes us as spacious internally as the universe we live in.

I was struck by the reality that inner space is a microcosmic version of outer space. Since then, I've found that becoming mindful of the body, and then intentionally sensing inner space, collapses our habitual orientations. Self and other, here and there, now and then, all recede. So does inside and outside. As we sense the infinite space in the universe and the infinite space within us, we experience ourselves dissolving into continuous awake space—into a vast undivided awareness.

The Backward Step

I've found it helpful to think of existence—the entire play of sounds and thoughts and bodies and trees—as the foreground of life, and awareness as the background. In the Zen tradition, the shift from focusing on the foreground of experience to resting in pure being is called “the backward step.” Whenever we step out of thought or emotional reactivity and remember the presence that is here, we are taking the backward step. If we wake up out of a confining story of who we are and reconnect with our essential awareness, we are taking the backward step. When our attention shifts from a narrow fixation on any object—sound, sensation, thought—and recognizes the awake space that holds everything, we are taking the backward step. We come to this realization when there is nowhere else to step. No anything. We have relaxed back into the immensity and silence of awareness itself.

You might pause for a moment and receive this living world. Let your senses be awake and wide open, taking everything in evenly, allowing life to be just as it is. As you notice the changing sounds and sensations, also notice the undercurrent of awareness—
be conscious of your own presence.
Allow the experience of life to continue to unfold in the foreground as you sense this alert inner stillness in the background. Then simply
be
this space of awareness, this wakeful openness. Can you sense how the experiences of this world continues to play through you, without in any way capturing or confining the inherent spaciousness of awareness? You are the sky with the bird flying through. A short Tibetan teaching evokes this boundless presence:

The Three Qualities of Awareness

When Siddhartha Gautama sat down under the bodhi tree, his resolve was to realize his true nature. Siddhartha had a profound interest in truth. The questions “Who am I?” and “What is reality?” impelled him to look deeply within and shine a light on his own awareness.

As a Zen story reminds us, this kind of inquiry is not an analytic or theoretical exploration. One day a novice asks the abbot of the monastery, “What happens after we die?” The venerable old monk responds, “I don't know.” Disappointed, the novice says, “But I thought you were a Zen monk.” “I am, but not a dead one!” The most powerful questions direct our attention to this very moment.

To practice self-inquiry, we quiet the mind and ask “Who am I?” or “Who is aware right now?” or “Who is listening?” Then we look gently back into awareness to see what is true. Ultimately, we find that there is no way for the mind to answer the question—there is no thing to actually see or feel. The point is simply to look, and then let go into the no-thing-ness that is here. The question “Who am I?” is meant to dissolve the sense of a searcher.

But this is not what happens right away. First we find all sorts of things we think we are, all our patterns of emotions and thoughts, our memories, the stories about who we take ourselves to be. Our attention keeps fixating on elements of the foreground. Maybe we have contacted a feeling. But we keep inquiring. “Who is feeling that?” we ask, or “Who is aware of this?” And the more we ask, the less we find to land on. Eventually the questions bring us into silence—there are no more backward steps. We can't answer.

The discovery of no-thing, according to Tibetan Buddhist teachings, is “the supreme seeing.” It reveals
the first basic quality of awareness: emptiness or openness.
Awareness is devoid of any form, of any center or boundary, of any owner or inherent self, of any solidity.

Yet our investigation also reveals that while empty of “thingness,” awareness is alive with wakefulness—a luminosity of continual knowing. Rumi puts it this way: “You are gazing at the light with its own ageless eyes.” Sounds, shapes and colors, sensations are spontaneously recognized. The entire river of experience is received and known by awareness. This is
the second basic quality of awareness: awakeness or cognizance.

If we let go and rest in this wakeful openness, we discover how awareness relates to form: When anything comes to mind—a person, situation, emotion—the spontaneous response is warmth or tenderness. This is
the third quality of awareness: the expression of unconditional love or compassion.
Tibetan Buddhists call this the unconfined capacity of awareness, and it includes joy, appreciation, and the many other qualities of heart.

When Siddhartha looked into his own mind, he realized the beauty and goodness of his essential nature and was free. The three fundamental qualities of our being—openness/emptiness, wakefulness, and love—are always here. Much of the path of true refuge is becoming familiar with them and living from them. Gradually we realize that this wakeful, tender awareness is more truly who we are than any story we've been generating about ourselves.
Rather than a human on a spiritual path, we are spirit discovering itself through a human incarnation.
As we come to understand and trust this, our life fills with increasing grace.

Becoming a Child of Wonder

One of the reflections I most love is drawn from a Tibetan Buddhist teaching that offers a beautiful reassurance. It tells us that the refuge of awareness is:

Closer than we can imagine.

What if today, just right now, is all you have? Can you allow yourself to arrive in the center of now and experience the alert inner stillness within you? Can you sense the consciousness that is looking through your eyes, listening to sounds, perceiving sensation? What is it like to recognize that awareness is closer than you can imagine?

More profound than we can imagine.

Ask yourself, “Am I dreaming?” and look to see if your mind is occupied in a story of reality that is veiling the mystery. What happens if you stop for just a moment, step out of your thoughts, and sense the space between and around them? Can you let yourself rest in the space of not-knowing? Can you sense the measureless depth and wakefulness of inner space? What is it like to recognize that awareness is more profound than you can imagine?

Easier than we can imagine.

Sufi poet Hafiz says that we are different from the saints because we still think we have “a thousand serious moves.” But just as we fall asleep and get lost in doing, we can fall awake. Invite yourself to be at ease, to give up any planning or attempts to control. Relax your body and mind, and allow everything to happen—sounds, sensations, feelings. Explore what it means to fall back into presence, to truly rest in presence. Can you sense the wakeful openness that is always and already here? What is it like to realize that coming home to awareness is easier than you can imagine?

More wondrous than we can imagine
.

Awareness experiences its own essence through the sensitivity of our body, heart, and mind. Can you sense that right now, awareness is perceiving its own dynamism, aliveness, and creativity in your body? Can you sense that it is realizing its capacity for boundless love through your heart? Can you sense that it is awakening to its vastness and luminosity through your mind? What is it like to realize that living with this awakened body, mind, and heart is more wondrous than you can imagine?