Sometimes when I’m sitting in meditation, my sense of my physical body falls away. I am inside my breath — the breath breathing me, as the yogis say — and I experience something close to pure consciousness. There is no inside me, no outside me. Just a mind perceiving. A mind at one with what it perceives.
Sitting cross-legged on my pillow in the quiet of my bedroom, I face the window, one or both of the hands lying quietly on my lap. My eyes are closed. For a few fleeting seconds there is nothing to grasp. Nothing to hold on to. How long does it last? Impossible to say. Thinking about it breaks it to bits, of course. Examining, wondering, noticing — all of these pierce the magic and bring me back to my same old self. Often, the phrase Your mind is just an empty cognizance floats through my head. I wait until I think I understand.
Stillness.
Occurance.
Awareness.
Just these three instances define my entire being — The mind that is devoid of thought is stillness. The occurrence of a thought breaks this stillness until the thought finally, if left alone and not chased after dissolves. The awareness is an empty space that contains it both — The stillness and the lack of it, the occurrence. So simple, isn’t it?
So simple, and yet so easy to forget. As I sit in meditation, I place my hands in my lap and remember. Just as my father wore his black skull cap each morning as he sat to pray, now I am finding my own touchstone. It may be different from my father’s, but still, it’s a ritual. I think he might even have approved. After all, it’s a formal way of considering, however briefly, what matters most.
Some days increasingly, I am able to carry that feeling — that pure awareness — around with me. It exists. I have felt it. And even though I can’t always touch it, I know it’s there. If I sit often enough, without expectations, it pays a visit. All that is required is to be quiet and mindful. To fight off the urge to jump up, check e-mail, jot down that idea. To sneak a glance at the clock. Surely forty minutes have gone by. Time to get back to sleep.
Buddhist teachers often use the word cultivation. They speak of cultivating awareness. Of cultivating a practice. The minutes add up, then the days, weeks, months, years. Something planted in a variation of a second takes root, and invisibly flowers. Cultivation is defined as the process of fostering growth. As it relates to biology, it is the way in which an individual organism grows organically; an unfolding of events involved as an organism changes gradually from a simple to a more complex level.
