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We
are pleased to present the following
excerpt from the book
The Mandala of
Being: Discovering the Power of
Awareness
by Richard Moss, MD
New World Library -
January 2007
The
Power of Awareness
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 nonreactive 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 by Richard Moss, MD. Published with
permission.
Dr.
Richard Moss is an internationally
respected leader in the field of conscious
living and inner transformation. He is the
author of five seminal books on using the
power of awareness to realize our
intrinsic wholeness and reclaim the wisdom
of our true selves.
Read Dr.
Dolhenty's Review of this Book
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