Pure consciousness
Jeroen
Luminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlands Veteran
This morning I woke up with the impulse that I should do something with ‘pure consciousness’. Google directed me to this extract from Jack Kornfield’s teachings, and I felt a connection. It’s very much about witnessing but yet being open. You might find it interesting.
While studying Buddhism in college, I tried a little meditation on my own. But it was unfamiliar and I was unsuccessful because I didn’t know what I was doing. It wasn’t that I was afraid of silence or of some terrible darkness that I would find inside, though these are common misunderstandings of meditation. It was that my body would get uncomfortable and my mind would spin out in a million directions. When I got Ajahn Chah’s teaching, the practice became gradually clearer. He taught me to relax and feel my breath carefully, which helped focus and quiet my mind. Then he taught me just to mindfully notice the stream of thoughts and sensations without reacting to them as a problem. This took some practice.
Comments
It do. Take practice. I very much like the term 'breath carefully'.
Breath is the presence in life. How soft is your breath unfolding?
Bizarre that an impulse to do something with 'Pure Consciousness' should animate a desire to check on Google... What would you have done, BEFORE Google, I wonder....?
Used Yahoo? Or Ask Jeeves? But you’re right, technology doesn’t always yield an answer. I might have consulted an Encyclopedia, or sat in thought about it for a few weeks. Before the internet I used to spend a lot more time in libraries.
Its all borrowed knowledge of course, which keeps us enamoured with the mind. Perhaps ‘pure’ consciousness is a pointer to the unconditioned, or to no-mind. It is said that we can only truely recognise our nature by being free of conditioning.
Our tie to technology is enormously widespread and insidious... the term Google was a Noun. It's now a verb.
My Point was that in order to experience Pure Consciousness, one shouldn't resort to Google to tell us everything we want to know. That's technical data.
Pure Consciousness isn't 'technical'. it's intuitive and intrinsic.
In order to take it in, let it go.
First line of article.
My raison d'être:
Got it in one.
...is opening up the six sense doors and let it all hang out
But foremost thing about consciousness is that it Can be pure but cannot be pure if it be bland. Actually it is loving consciousness. Mind with Heart, Light with Heat.
You can mentally separate the heat of the Sun's rays from the light these beams also bestow, but they ride together on the same wave (or particle-beam, if you be of that more technical sect). But you cannot physically separate them. Such is consciousness, purely.
You are a being with both affect and intellect. As your being does not end at your fingertips, nor does the being of your consciousness. You are the world you love, the things you hate— and you embrace so much that you don't even know. Affinity is love, hatred is boundedness to ego or tribe. Affinity is the better way, but needs grounding.
Metta is where I always start. Then comes flow.