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Inner
Frontier Fourth Way Spiritual Practice |
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Inner Work For the week of February 26, 2018
Conscious Energy Awareness Recall back when you were a young child. What is the same in and for you, now as then? Obviously, many things have changed, principally your body and decades of experiences. Much around you has changed: technology, society, new friends, your family, your home, your knowledge. Yet is there something in you that is the same, that has not changed? Looking carefully, you may find a part of you that does not change, namely your awareness itself, your consciousness. Within your consciousness, it is always here and now. This was true when you were a child and it is true at this very moment. Your experience is always of and in the present. Though your body may travel from one location to another, inside your experience you are always right here. Though your thoughts, your imagination may transport you to distant times and places, in the awareness behind those thoughts you are always here and now. If you look into your experiencing, you may recognize your own unchanging core. Bare awareness itself does not change. Within you, even now, there is a smooth, seamless continuum of consciousness, space-like and without boundaries. This bedrock of perception displays all the passing content of experience without itself changing, like a TV or monitor that shows a stream of images and sounds while remaining the same itself. So it is with the stream of consciousness. Sit quietly. Do nothing. Just sit. Let your thoughts and mental images come and ago as they will. Do not try to shape the content of your experience. Just stay alert. Do not wait for something to happen: it is already happening. Just be here in your experience. Your thoughts may slow down. Between them there seems to be nothing. Just a blank stillness. But you are still here and aware in that blank space. Your awareness is what remains when the thoughts stop or a gap opens between them. Simple, pure awareness, prior to thought, prior to body sensations, prior to sights or sounds. That stillness is cognizant, your cognition. It does not change. It is prior to time itself. This is the cognizant field on which events, perceptions, and everything happens. This is pure being, where you can just be. This is the ocean of conscious energy. And then, you go back to your normal world, into activities of body and mind. All of that hides your pure awareness. Like the air around us, we do not see it or take notice of it. Yet we are always in the field of consciousness. It surrounds us and pervades us, through and through. Though we are otherwise engaged, our fundamental, bedrock awareness is still there behind it all, beneath it all, receiving it all. For this week, please notice this pure, cognizant field, this bare awareness, this boundless plenum of formless consciousness, this ever-present, living substrate of experience itself. |
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