The constant Yes
How awareness accepts and bears all things
Close your eyes and listen.
Notice how different sounds arrive without your control, without you planning for them to appear.
Notice how easily and effortlessly they slide in and out of your awareness.
Does awareness say “no” to the arrival of any of these sounds? Or is it wide open for them, accepting all?
For me - the sounds arrive without resistance. Awareness says “yes” to them, without a shadow of rejection or resistance.
The same occurs with feelings, sights, thoughts. They all arrive without resistance, without struggle. Awareness, again, says yes.
So why is there so much struggle in life? Why the weariness, the effort, the drudgery, when everything appears free-flowing and accepted in awareness?
Why does life appear as “too much” sometimes?
It is because of the stories we tell about ourselves. The mind constantly interprets what appears in awareness as being good or bad, easy or difficult, relative to the character I assume myself to be.
Let’s say my boss says something to me about doing a poor job on a project. If I take a stance as the open field of awareness that I am, the words freely arrive and leave without resistance or grasping.
But if I take myself to be a person in a threatening world, something else occurs. Awareness accepts the words from the boss without resistance, but then the mind comes along and tells a story. Awareness also accepts this story without resistance.
The story is that there is a “me” in this world who is now threatened, who may lose their job, whose family may be imperilled, who may be homeless as a result and so on. Because everything is connected, this story starts a loop of reinforcing feelings of anxiety or dread, which in turns drives more stories and so on.
This is suffering. Awareness says yes to suffering as well. It accepts its arrival freely, without resistance.
But in the doom-loop of suffering there are further stories about life being too much, too difficult, too hard. All because we have mistaken ourselves to be an entity, a separate self, living in an external world.
If, instead, attention takes a step back from the story, from the feelings, from the thoughts about a “me”, then suffering fades.
Why? Because by attention taking its step back into awareness itself, it can be noticed that all these feelings, thoughts, words, sights, sounds and so on arrive without effort and leave without effort.
In this state of attention one is the space in which they arise and fall, where there is nobody to struggle or resist. Then everything flows easily, and life is no longer a burden but a playground where interesting and surprising things happen without any struggle, and without any pushing away or resistance.
It then becomes more natural to reside in that open state of attention, rather than the cramped story of the separate self, as it is more pleasant there.
How does one enter that attentional stance? By letting go of the stories. By doing exercises like the above of freely listening and noticing how easily everything arrives and departs. By noticing that there are no actual boundaries in direct experience between a “me” in here and the world “out there”.
For more reflections and exercises regarding this stance - see Lesson 4 of my Finding Freedom course.
By doing such things - one learns to reside more and more in that wide open space where life is a celebration rather than a heavy burden.
Great post. Keep more like this coming.
I’ve been recently learning about consciousness and awareness from a physics perspective. There are so many good episodes on YouTube in the Richard Feynman series.
This Everyday Awakening post explains exactly what I’ve been trying to understand, but without the physics.
Super interesting how consciousness intersects “hard” physics and “soft” meditation. I had never seen them so connected - if, indeed, I’m beginning to understand them correctly.