Don’t Stop with Awareness Itself

I learned a lot watching Ajaan Fuang teach other people how to meditate. In the beginning, as he said, he was trying to get everyone to one spot on the map. Different people were starting out from different locations: some to the north, some to the south, east, west. Some could make a straight line to the spot he wanted them to go to. Others meandered around or ran into obstacles. Some people had visions that got in the way. In one sense, the visions were encouragement. It was fun to play with them. But some people got stuck on the visions, and he’d have to pry them loose. In some cases, he was able to; in some cases, he wasn’t.

Then there were those who had weird sensations in the body. The body was suddenly growing very large or very, very small. Different parts of the body would get distorted. One time we were sitting in a group, and at the end of the meditation session a woman who was sitting near me mentioned that she felt as if she had a big body but no head. I had been sitting there with the sensation that I was nothing but head with no body.

Some people got stuck on different elements. One guy was sitting meditating and suddenly got very, very stiff. He’d been focusing too much on the earth element.

So Ajaan Fuang had to use his ingenuity in getting people past these problems. As he said, people often came with problems he had never encountered in his own meditation. But he found that the basic solution would come from going back to those seven steps in Ajaan Lee’s Method Two. They were doing something wrong with one of the steps. If he could figure out which one, then he’d get them past their problem.

The spot he was trying to get everybody to was the stage in the meditation where the breath energy fills the body and you feel no need to breathe. Your awareness is very still. Everything is very calm, equanimous. From that point on, everybody’s meditation seemed to follow the same steps.

Once the breath element was all ironed out, smoothed out, filling the body, then he would have you focus on fire, the warmth in the body. Find one spot in the body that’s warmer than others. Focus your attention there and then think of the warmth spreading throughout the whole body.

If things got too warm, you could think of water. That would cool things down. Whatever was the coolest spot in the body, focus on that and think of that coolness spreading through the body.

Then earth: the solid feelings in the body, the weighty feelings in the body. Here again, you could dial these up as you liked, as if you were fiddling with the dials on a stereo: Make them stronger, make them weaker.

Then you’d try to bring all four of those elements into balance: not too warm, not too cold, not too heavy, not too light. And just sit there, perfectly balanced.

Then you begin to notice that the sense of the surface of the body begins to disappear. What you’re left with is a cloud of sensation droplets, with no clear outline. Focus on the space between the drops. That gets you to the space element. You learn how to stay with that for a while, holding that perception in mind. Then finally, consciousness: You would turn around and ask, What’s aware of the space? There you would be with awareness itself.

And he wouldn’t have you stop there. He’d have you reflect on that awareness. But first, he’d have you use it to see what else was coming up in the mind and to see that everything that arose in that awareness was separate from the awareness itself. The awareness was one thing; the object was something else. And because everything was so calm in the body, subtle things in the mind appeared in a lot more clearly than they did before. You could see things arising and see them as something separate. You could let them go. That sense of “my thoughts, my feelings, my emotions” got weaker and weaker. The awareness was one thing. You did tend at that point to identify with the awareness, so anything else that came up that was separate was obviously not you. You were in a good position to let it go.

But then this attachment to your awareness, you’d have to do something about that. As Ajaan Fuang would say, you have to turn around and look at this awareness and see that it, too, is fabricated. It, too, has its drawbacks. It’s not the case that everything you look at is inconstant, stressful, and not-self, whereas this awareness is constant and easeful and self. This awareness has its ups and downs, subtle as they are, and that enables you to see that it, too, is fabricated.

So, as he would say, let go of the awareness, let go of anything that’s happening in the present moment. And if your letting go is transcendent, it’ll be guaranteed by an experience of the deathless. Otherwise, it’ll be just a mundane letting go. In other words, you let go for a while, but nothing really deep has happened.

Still, the important point is that you don’t stop with awareness itself. There’s more to be done.

Other forest ajaans made the same point. Ajaan Chah was once asked if the knower in the meditation was the same thing as awakened awareness. He said, “Of course not.”

Or Ajaan Maha Bua: He talked about the processes of the meditation and he described getting into this state of just “knowing itself” or “awareness itself.” He said, “Up to this point you’ve trusted it. You’ve trusted it in the face of all the other things that would come up. But now you’ve got to turn a skeptical eye and see that it, too, is suspect. It, too, is constructed and fabricated.” If you don’t see that, you just get stuck there. Which is why it’s important to realize this is just a stage in concentration. It’s not the goal of the practice.

I saw a tee-shirt the other day saying, “You don’t need to know anything except knowing itself.” Well, that’s teaching you to be stuck right here. And it raises a couple of questions. If that’s all you need to know, why did the Buddha teach so many other things? Why did he teach the four noble truths? Why did he teach the processes of fabrication and dependent co-arising? These are things to know for the purpose of taking apart any attachment to your awareness. If you assume that that’s what you are, then you’re going to be stuck there. You’ll assume that all you have to do is just be aware and not pass judgment on anything.

Well, what are the noble truths? What are the duties of the four noble truths? The four noble truths are there for you to analyze things, and the duties are there for you to pass judgment and do what needs to be done. You don’t just notice things coming and going. Some things, when they come, are the cause of suffering, the cause of stress. Now, on this level, the stress may be very, very subtle. But it’s still there. And those are things you have to let go of. You have to judge them to see their drawbacks.

Then there’s the path: That should be developed. You don’t just watch it come and watch it go, saying, “Well, it’s just like this.” When it comes, you try to maintain it. If it’s not there, you try to give rise to it, develop it further. There will come a point where you have to let it go, too. But there are duties to be done in the meantime, and there are good reasons why the Buddha taught what he taught. He knew what he was doing. The all-you-need-to-know-is-knowing meditators aren’t smarter than he was. He had all those teachings—all the wings to awakening, all the factors of dependent co-arising—so that you don’t get stuck on things. Whenever you find something that you think, “This must be what I am,” learn to look askance at it, as Ajaan Maha Bua would say. It’s not as reliable as you might have thought.

Then when you let go, it’s not just letting go in a mundane way. As Ajaan Fuang said, when you really let go, there’s a transcendent awareness that comes, a transcendent discernment that comes, guaranteeing that, yes, you really have understood. And that’s something totally different. It comes from letting go not only of your present awareness, but also of the present moment entirely. It’s not here and now. It’s beyond here and now.

So don’t stop at just awareness. Do your best to get there to begin with. Remind yourself that realizing ahead of time that ultimately you’re going to have to let go of the path doesn’t mean you should be discouraged from constructing it. It’s like building the raft to go across the river: You know you have to hold on to the raft as long as you’re in the river, because there’s no other way across, and the river is dangerous. It’s at full flood. When you get to the other side, then you can let the raft go. You let go not with a sense of dismissal. You let go with a sense of appreciation. But you’ve got better things. You’re not there just to be with the raft. You want the safety of the other side.

So make sure that you don’t stop halfway across and just start gliding down the river, noticing what it’s like, not passing judgment. There are dangers in that river: whirlpools, sharks. After all, this is a river in India.

So do your best to get to that spot on the map. Whatever the obstacles you may have, there are ways around them, using Ajaan Lee’s seven steps as a guide. Get to that spot where everything is very still—the breath is still, the body is still, and it’s still not because you force it to be still. It just feels naturally that you don’t need to breathe because everything is so full of breath energy inside. Then work with the elements until there’s nothing left but awareness itself. Use that to see the subtle things going on in the mind, so that you can let go of those. As the Buddha said, you commit, and then you turn around and you reflect: “Those things have to be let go. What about this awareness, too?”

The Buddha’s teachings all have this reflective quality. Right view looks at all other views in terms of the fact that they’re stressful, inconstant, put together. It lets go of them and then realizes that those same truths apply to it. Your awareness sees things as inconstant, stressful, and not-self, but it’s lying to itself if it doesn’t turn around at some point and say, “Well, the same thing applies here.”

So don’t just stop with awareness. There’s more work to be done. Good work. Work that’s infinitely rewarding.