Flowing Awareness vs Witnessing

[Unseeking Seeker]

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Flowing Awareness vs Witnessing

To get beyond the limitations of thought moving in trajectories mired in fear, desire, attachments and memory imagery, in choosing to explore what lies beyond the mind, we may slow down thought by simply looking at it nonchalantly. This looking or witnessing is however inhibiting, in that the spontaneity of the pristine flow of unobserved awareness is marred by the witnessing consciousness.

The subject-object relationship of the observer & observed, both us interferes with the free flow of our ever present awareness, owing to a subtle identity association invoked by the activity of so consciously witnessing. Even if there be no judgment in the observation, there is yet inevitably a faint colouration of anticipation drawn from stored experiential memory.

Rephrased, we may say that our earth mind-body interface being present, filters through its own perception the movement of our awareness thereby also contouring its expanse and modulating its pulse.

As we gradually hollow out our being, weeding away attachments, fears & desires in lived reality of thought, word & deed in as much as we are able, there still remains within us an imprint of a pattern borne of physical & mental activity that makes each of us unique. The aspect of surrender to remove resistance assumes importance with a view to disassociating our flowing awareness from the threads that connect it to the mind-body and yet the futility of doing so becomes apparent since being in occupation of this interface, we as of now, operate through it. Moreover, surrendering needs to be a happening rather than a doing since we would not like the doer to manifest surreptitiously as the surrenderer so surrendering.

I leave these contemplations without definitive closure for those who wish to add, subtract or modify them pointing out the direction leading towards deepening dynamic stillness and pristine silence.

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Flowing awareness. That resonates with one of the techniques I practice: choiceless awareness where there is no object, so it's not a single-pointed concentration method. I've also heard it called open awareness, bare awareness and Jon Kabat-Zinn refers to it as resting in awareness.

Does that sound like what you refer to as flowing awareness?

My experience is it first required cultivating a solid foundation through single-pointed concentration techniques.

Richie Davidson monitored Buddhist monks meditating in his lab using EEG and fMRI and says the state produced by this technique is defined by gamma oscillations across widespread regions of the brain. Oscillations in the 40 to 80 Hz range and they are highly synchronous. Here's a metaphor he uses to describe it.

Picture a lake with a surface so calm it's as if looking at a mirror. Toss a stone into it and the ripples are clearly visible, even from the far shore. Juxtapose that to a lake with a turbulent surface. Toss a stone into it and the ripples aren't visible, even if one is close. The clarity of that state is a product not of boosting the signal but reducing the noise.

Furthermore if a stimulus is introduced (stone tossed into the lake) it locks onto an oscillation. When I practice choiceless awareness I think I experience that as hyper awareness for lack of a better phrasing. For example something I normally barely notice, say the tiny click when the heating system's thermostat clicks on, is clearly discernible.

[Unseeking Seeker]

Originally Posted by JustASimpleGuy

Flowing awareness. That resonates with one of the techniques I practice: choiceless awareness where there is no object, so it's not a single-pointed concentration method. I've also heard it called open awareness, bare awareness and Jon Kabat-Zinn refers to it as resting in awareness.

Does that sound like what you refer to as flowing awareness?

My experience is it first required cultivating a solid foundation through single-pointed concentration techniques.

Richie Davidson monitored Buddhist monks meditating in his lab using EEG and fMRI and says the state produced by this technique is defined by gamma oscillations across widespread regions of the brain. Oscillations in the 40 to 80 Hz range and they are highly synchronous. Here's a metaphor he uses to describe it.

Picture a lake with a surface so calm it's as if looking at a mirror. Toss a stone into it and the ripples are clearly visible, even from the far shore. Juxtapose that to a lake with a turbulent surface. Toss a stone into it and the ripples aren't visible, even if one is close. The clarity of that state is a product not of boosting the signal but reducing the noise.

Furthermore if a stimulus is introduced (stone tossed into the lake) it locks onto an oscillation. When I practice choiceless awareness I think I experience that as hyper awareness for lack of a better phrasing. For example something I normally barely notice, say the tiny click when the heating system's thermostat clicks on, is clearly discernible.

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Thanks for your post. Let me elaborate a bit ...

First we pause the momentum of our thoughts by just looking at it without attempting to modify them.

Who looks? We as the immaculate unchanging witness.

Whose thought is it? Ours. Rooted in ephemerality.

We are the subject and we too are the object.

The difference lies in awareness self aware of its attention looking outwards. Without so looking, we are stuporous.

So we look and in so looking, the ego conditioned mind-body recedes becoming self conscious since it is under watch. It slows down. What remains? ‘I Am’ awareness or we may simply say, is-ness or being-ness. It is as is and yet not quite since the ego is still present.

Flowing awareness remains but yet the flow is not free since some i-dentity association is present and with it experiential memory which represents a blockage.

This flowing awareness or dynamic stillness of what we may call as meditation knows nothing and so seeks nothing, remaining attentively positioned in a partial aspect of mind-body disassociated surrendered allowing. The degree of our awareness’s disassociation from the mind-body determines the depth of our meditation.

The mind-body association involuntarily suggests to awareness a subtle trajectory of unfolding offered by the Universe in our meditation, thereby limiting and even deflecting the pristinity of the Divine experience.

A line I use in this context to propose the emptying out of mind body conditioning leading to non doing is: ‘stilling not our stillness now let stillness still our being’

Therefore, unless we empty ourselves layer by layer until we are hollowed out, we cannot hope to be a seamlessly free flowing awareness. Our latent thoughts and even outwardly turned senses block our magnetic field which automatically draws the divine energy to fill the void within.

On a perhaps more non abstract basis, we may better understand the dilemma as our awareness being unable to remain present just as it is without the tail of the comet as i-dentity weighing it down. This limiting factor remains in deep meditation, kundalini ascending, grace descending, void filling, ॐ reverberating, manifestation appearing and disappearing and so on. Only in the explosive rapture of undefinable and ineffable boundless bliss in renewal does true oneness and Absoluteness come into being in permanence for the unquantifiable conjoined seamless continuum in time when it so happens when only bliss is without anything else.

***

[Miss Hepburn]

Originally Posted by Unseeking Seeker

On a perhaps more non abstract basis, we may better understand the dilemma as our awareness being
unable to remain present just as it is without the tail of the comet as i-dentity weighing it down.
This limiting factor remains in deep meditation, kundalini ascending, grace descending, void filling, ॐ reverberating, manifestation appearing and disappearing and so on.
Only in the explosive rapture of undefinable and ineffable boundless bliss in renewal does true oneness and Absoluteness come into being in permanence for the unquantifiable
conjoined seamless continuum in time when it so happens when only bliss is without anything else.

Are you having a hard time containing yourself?

Originally Posted by Unseeking Seeker

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Thanks for your post. Let me elaborate a bit ...

First we pause the momentum of our thoughts by just looking at it without attempting to modify them.

Who looks? We as the immaculate unchanging witness.

Whose thought is it? Ours. Rooted in ephemerality.

We are the subject and we too are the object.

The difference lies in awareness self aware of its attention looking outwards. Without so looking, we are stuporous.

So we look and in so looking, the ego conditioned mind-body recedes becoming self conscious since it is under watch. It slows down. What remains? ‘I Am’ awareness or we may simply say, is-ness or being-ness. It is as is and yet not quite since the ego is still present.

Flowing awareness remains but yet the flow is not free since some i-dentity association is present and with it experiential memory which represents a blockage.

This flowing awareness or dynamic stillness of what we may call as meditation knows nothing and so seeks nothing, remaining attentively positioned in a partial aspect of mind-body disassociated surrendered allowing. The degree of our awareness’s disassociation from the mind-body determines the depth of our meditation.

The mind-body association involuntarily suggests to awareness a subtle trajectory of unfolding offered by the Universe in our meditation, thereby limiting and even deflecting the pristinity of the Divine experience.

A line I use in this context to propose the emptying out of mind body conditioning leading to non doing is: ‘stilling not our stillness now let stillness still our being’

Therefore, unless we empty ourselves layer by layer until we are hollowed out, we cannot hope to be a seamlessly free flowing awareness. Our latent thoughts and even outwardly turned senses block our magnetic field which automatically draws the divine energy to fill the void within.

On a perhaps more non abstract basis, we may better understand the dilemma as our awareness being unable to remain present just as it is without the tail of the comet as i-dentity weighing it down. This limiting factor remains in deep meditation, kundalini ascending, grace descending, void filling, ॐ reverberating, manifestation appearing and disappearing and so on. Only in the explosive rapture of undefinable and ineffable boundless bliss in renewal does true oneness and Absoluteness come into being in permanence for the unquantifiable conjoined seamless continuum in time when it so happens when only bliss is without anything else.

***

Keep in mind I'm Just A Simple Guy.

Okay, I just had to get that out but I do appreciate your reply.

It's very early here in the northeast U.S. and the first cup of coffee is barely kicking in.

[Miss Hepburn]

Originally Posted by JustASimpleGuy

Keep in mind I'm Just A Simple Guy.
Okay, I just had to get that out but I do appreciate your reply.
It's very early here in the northeast U.S. and the first cup of coffee is barely kicking in.

I am, too. And proud of it...it took me a long time to become this simple.
(I had to read some sentences 2-3 times slowly to capture the meaning...
and
I was in a special class in High School for being so smart! 6 of us!
After college I went downhill fast!)

I do notice I get smarter after coffee!

Originally Posted by Miss Hepburn

[color=Black]I am, too. And proud of it...it took me a long time to become this simple.

A while back when I was into TKD I came across this quote and took it to heart.

"It is not daily increase but daily decrease – hack away the unessential! The closer to the source, the less wastage there is." ~ Bruce Lee

Guess I'm doing a good job?

[Unseeking Seeker]

Originally Posted by Miss Hepburn

Are you having a hard time containing yourself?

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The rational mind questions whilst consciousness just is

It is but for the moment it’s back is turned onto itself to feel the fizz

As attention oscillates between polarities the self evident becomes a quiz

If it be a part of the game let us play

Let the pendulum sway

As long as at the fulcrum of dynamic stillness we stay

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