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The
Power of Awareness (an
excerpt)
Richard Moss
Any
story you tell yourself about who you are, any belief you
have, any feeling you are aware of, is only an object of
your larger consciousness. You, in your essence, are always
something that experiences all these and remains more
complete than any of them. When you realize that you
are inherently larger than any feeling that enters your
awareness, this very awareness will change the feeling, and
it will release its grip on you.
Similarly,
ideas that you have about yourself are relative, not
absolute truths. If you simply look at them and do not
let them lead you into further thinking, they will give
way and leave your mind open and silent. There is
always a relationship between who we believe or feel
ourselves to be and something else, the Self that is our
larger awareness.
In
awakening to this Self-me relationship, we begin to be
present with our experience in a new way. We learn to
consciously hold our thoughts and feelings in our own larger
fields of awareness. Then, even if we are troubled and
confused, this non-reactive quality of presence to ourselves
allows us to restore ourselves to a sense of
wholeness. This is the power of awareness.
Sensation
and Perception: Our Original Consciousness
The
great Indian sage Ramana Maharshi said that if we want to
know our true selves, we must “go back by the way that we
have come.” Our original state of consciousness in
childhood is not one of being a separate entity with our own
thoughts and sensations, but rather is a relatively
undifferentiated domain of sensation and perception.
Our parents, having already reached the developmental stage
of separate-self consciousness, provide the model by which
we begin to develop our own sense of the separate self.
But
when we take the developmental step into the consciousness
of the separate self and leave behind the universe of
immediacy and undifferentiated sensations, as a consequence
we also become identified with our sensations. Who is
happy? Me.
Who is angry, tired, frustrated . . . ? Me.
Our feelings acquire names, however, and at the same time,
we are defined by those feelings.
The
same is true with perception: we may not feel that the
sunshine on the trees is me,
but we cannot identify it without simultaneously existing as
a separate me.
In psychological and philosophical theory, this level of
consciousness is called “subject-object.” It is
the level of ego awareness where most human development
stops. We are aware as me,
we react as me,
we defend as me,
we desire as me,
but we are not aware of the true self. It is the true
self that looks at all we think, do, and experience,
including our sense of me.
In this looking, a relationship is created that has the
power to transform our experience of ourselves and our
worlds.
Throughout
our lives, the moment we bring our awareness fully into the
Now, we enter the domain of the true self, and our immediate
conscious reality is once again that of sensation and
perception. As I sit in the park, the sunlight
brightens the leaves and casts shadows on the ground. I have
a feeling of contentment. And as long as “I”
don’t create stories about what I am seeing or about the
fact that I am feeling content, which leads me away from my immediate
experience, what I experience remains simply
perception and sensation. The same is true for any
feeling, any emotion. In the Now, it is just what it
is. In the Now, I “go back” to my original
awareness “by the way that [I] have come.” When we
directly perceive and experience whatever is present in our
larger fields of awareness, it is possible to have a
relationship with it without becoming lost in it or defined
by it.
Exercising
the Power of Awareness
We
exercise the power of awareness and strengthen our spiritual
muscle by bringing ourselves, over and over again, into the
immediate present. To do so, we must become present with
what we are feeling and thinking. We can turn our attention
directly toward what we are experiencing instead of staying
enmeshed in a feeling or blindly accepting our beliefs about
ourselves.
It
makes all the difference in the world whether we are caught
in a negative emotion and say, “I am sad, angry,
lonely,” and so on, or are able to recognize, at that
moment, “Here am I, all wound up in sensations of
resentment. Here am I, fuming with anger.”
Awareness of our sensations is not the same as identifying
with our thoughts or feelings. Every movement back to
present-moment awareness grounds us in the body and opens
the connection to our larger awareness.
Even
the smallest movement toward exercising the power of
awareness, instead of collapsing our larger awareness into
our thoughts and feelings and thereby becoming identified
with them, restores us to a more complete
consciousness. It gives us the power to start from a
fresh, open, less conditioned relationship to our
experience. This doesn’t necessarily mean that our
problems disappear. But as we exercise the power of
awareness, our reflexive reactivity diminishes. We
respond from a state of greater presence. When we
collapse into our feelings, we lose this capacity. We
default into me,
and this limited self seems like the whole of who we are.
Then we have no choice but to react because we feel as if we
must defend ourselves.
The
Fundamental Relationship
What
are we actually doing when we bring our awareness fully into
the present and realize “Here am I . . . ”? We are
moving into a more spacious awareness and thus creating
conscious distance from what we are experiencing. At
the same time, we are opening toward our immediate
experience to see it as it is, to see it fully, to invite it
to reveal itself more completely to us. We are seeing
as objectively as we can, without reacting or judging.
This lets us more completely realize what we are actually
feeling or sensing; we do not merely remain in our heads,
interpreting and analyzing.
It
is important to point out that moving our awareness into the
Now and thereby gaining distance from our feelings and
thoughts is not dissociation. A frequent mistake people make
with Eastern meditation practices is to try to rise above
and detach from an experience, especially whenever the
experience is considered negative. To exercise the
power of awareness, we are required to become more present
in our experiences without losing our larger
awareness. With this quality of attention, we gain
true understanding. We naturally begin to respond to
our experiences in the most appropriate and intelligent
ways.
This
intimate viewing of ourselves by our awareness is the most
fundamental of all relationships. We create the
possibility of a conscious, empathetic connection between me
(or self) and our true selves, or what is alternatively
referred to as the Self. The personal self that we
experience as ourselves is held, seen, and felt deeply by that,
which will never reject me,
never turn away, never judge me.
It can see us judging, attacking ourselves, creating our own
misery; but it does not judge even this. It is simply
present with me.
This
presence need not be merely neutral or indifferent. We
can let it be our trusted friend, like the Persian mystic
poets Hafiz and Rumi did when they referred to it as the
“Guest” or the “Beloved,” to whom they offered
themselves and who always received them.
The
key to cultivating the healing potential of the self-Self
relationship is the quality of our attention -- the
steadiness, gentleness, and acceptance of the “gaze” we
turn toward ourselves. We must be truly willing to
experience our feelings and clearly see our thoughts without
reaction, allowing the moment to be exactly as it is without
defending ourselves against these feelings and thoughts,
without our minds moving away into further thought.
Then that
which transcends our capacity to name or categorize it in
any way, is present to us and has the same accepting quality
that we present to ourselves. This is also the essence
of meditation and prayer. By keeping our attention in
the present moment, we can become transparent to what is
transcendent. It is the Self’s profoundly empathetic
acceptance of self that ultimately sustains us when we face
our deepest fears, including even our egos’ primal terror,
nonbeing.
Copyright
© 2007 Richard Moss, MD. Richard Moss is
an internationally respected teacher, visionary thinker, and
author of five seminal books on transformation,
self-healing, and the importance of living consciously. For
thirty years he has guided people from diverse backgrounds
and disciplines in the use of the power of awareness to
realize their intrinsic wholeness and reclaim the wisdom of
their true selves. He teaches a practical philosophy of
consciousness that models how to integrate spiritual
practice and psychological self-inquiry into a concrete and
fundamental transformation of people's lives. Richard lives
in Ojai, California, with his wife, Ariel.
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Drawing
on his three decades
of teaching consciousness,
Richard Moss plays the role
of wise shepherd, accompanying and encouraging the
reader
on a journey toward the
genius within and away
from fear and other limitations.
Most importantly, he offers
an always-available compass
that directs readers back
to the true self, and into
the magic of the
present moment. |
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