Awareness is what life’s all about. At least, it’s what I like my life to be about. At the end of it I want to be able to say, truthfully, that I was aware - awake, attentive to what’s going on, not dreaming or ‘out to lunch’ or living in times long past or fantasies of what may be.
In a practical example, I love preparing and preserving old timbers and furniture. It often means hours of full attention on what is before me with steel wool in hand or sandpaper or a polishing rag. It means being focused on what is before me to the exclusion of all thoughts. This is an example of awareness to a task, but what about the larger task of living?
In this sense, I don’t mean aware all the time of course, but often, increasingly, to the best of my ability. Naturally I like having lovely feelings, enjoying peak experiences when they arrive, perhaps even taking off into mystical realms. But when they don’t include experiencing who is in receipt of all such experiences, then they’re a sort of lapse into unawareness and (at best) pleasant vacations from the main business of my life - namely being really aware. Which means self-aware, and ultimately Self-aware.
But it does beg a rather big question though; awareness of precisely what?
You are taking in a page covered with lines of black marks (these printed words) on some sort of electronic device, probably held in your hands. While continuing to look straight at this printing, notice how those two hands connect with arms that grow fuzzy and fade out altogether well short of your shoulders (what shoulders?). And now observe how, between these fuzzy arms stretches an area of chest which itself gets fuzzy and then disappears well short of any neck (what neck?). Try tracing with your finger now the “neckline” where your chest stops in your line of vision, and notice what’s on your side, the near side, of this permanent décolletage.
Strange - isn’t it? - how completely we overlook these near regions, refusing to see what we see where seeing matters most, and dishonesty is disaster. Perhaps a subtle dishonesty we easily perpetrate all of the time (unconsciously) is ignoring our direct – firsthand experience, i.e. what is actually within our direct experience and view.
Another example: are you now, in your own first-hand experience, peering at these black marks through two, yes two, small windows in a globular, hairy look-out called a head? If so, try to describe what it’s like in there - congested? Dimly lit? Sticky? Small? Or is it a fact that, going by present evidence, you find nothing whatever right here where you thought you sported a head, nothing but space? Space containing what? Space filled with these words, these pages, these arms and chest? Speckless and boundless capacity or room, alive to itself as empty - and filled with those things, taking in the ever-changing scene? Space, sometimes, for your face and head and shoulders also - where you find and keep them - over there behind your mirror, quarter size, the “wrong” way round, and three feet adrift from your torso?
Yes, you’ve got it! You see with total clarity Who and what you’ve always been, namely this Disappearance in favour of others, this Emptiness which is aware of itself as no-thing and therefore all things. How could we not see this most obvious of all sights, once our attention is drawn to it?
Congratulations! You’re enlightened! You always were. Isn’t that a relief?
So, what are the benefits, in the practice of daily living, of being aware… Here are five of them.
First, what’s done attentively is done better. An attentive life is a wonderful life. The same goes at any scale, clean dishes are much better than dirty dishes, so I am aware when I wash my dishes.
Second, you actually enjoy what is in your complete focus. For it isn’t the repetitiveness of a job which makes it boring, but inattention.
Third, how much of our fear and pain (including discomfort from boredom) come from importing into the present moment what doesn’t belong to it! And in instances where physical pain is present – I am thinking of a simple example of a personal training session with my PT, the pain is in a physical location, not in the emptiness. If the emptiness cannot be hurt, then there cannot be anything to fear.
Fourth, the long-term rewards of this awareness training are serenity, detachment, self-knowledge. The more of ourselves we can bring to consciousness, the less it bugs us and evolves into complete acceptance, no matter what shows up.
The fifth and chief reason I practice mindfulness is to graduate from what’s being experienced to WHO’s experiencing. In a word, enlightenment. Congratulations! You’re enlightened! You always were. Attaining it is realising you never left it. Rather than becoming aware, you experience Awareness as your very being.
I find the awareness that arises though working with beautiful furniture, touching the creative process of the creators of the furniture, being aware of the stories of the lives that the furniture touches and being aware of what it means to our planet by recycling, repairing and preserving… and so much more, is a rich, beautiful and fully engaged life.
Very simple, in fact so simple the vast majority of the human population will not do it. But the option will always be present. Why not give yourself the ancient and rare present of presence this Christmas?
