Читать книгу Opening the Door: Jan Frazier Teachings On Awakening - Jan Inc. Frazier - Страница 5

In ordinary awareness, most moments of life seem to be like this. I am (anyone is) a certain person, having a particular identity, separate from all around me. I am here, now, and something is occurring. Maybe I’m doing something, or observing something, or something is happening to me. Maybe something noticeable is going on inside, in mind or body or emotions. There’s a physical setting and I’m located in it. Things appear to be in motion. I am somehow engaged with the surrounding experience. I am experiencing, processing, reacting. My inner response to what’s happening in the immediate scene has a landscape and an energy of its own.

Whatever the primary focus of attention, whether the immediate outer condition or an absorbing inner reality, there’s an ongoing sense that I am a physically contained awareness moving through space, moving through time, and subject to experience. That I am separate, a subject taking in an object.

Now forget all of that.

In a moment of presence, in which the solid sense of self is felt to briefly dissolve, what happens? For some reason (a thing we are not in charge of), a door has opened. In floods awareness. This is not a mental experience. It is not a “spiritual” experience. (Forget all of that too.) This is a human experience. It’s about feeling. Presence is the enlivening of intelligent awareness that is felt throughout the body.

Something has caused awareness to sense itself. People often will say they recall vividly the first time this happened. Probably it was in youth.

What opens the door? The gathering of electrified attention. The quieting of thought. An encounter with astonishing beauty can do it. Being stunned by radically unanticipated circumstances. Extreme physical effort. Rhythmic, repetitive, “mindless” activity. Creative endeavor. Breathtaking emotional or physical pain. (I experienced it at the height of labor contractions.) But even just the plain, quiet gathering of attention will open the door.

You are in utter stillness. Briefly, the familiar sense of person-having-experience has melted into diffuse awareness. There is sensation. Deep peace. Likely, you feel something. Alive, alive, you are alive. The mind is still. The apparent separateness of a self — so familiar — has softened. You are the moment. You are the space in which all is taking place. What’s happening “around” you is on the same plane of reality, in the same space, as whatever’s going on inside your apparent self (thoughts, feelings, sensations). It’s all one “thing.” (This is what is meant by “being one with all that is.”)

What holds the door shut? (For this, the shut door, is the primary ongoing human experience.) Resistance. Pushing away the spontaneous feeling that comes in response to a moment of life. Mentally managing a feeling. Making up a story about what’s happened, erecting a barrier to protect yourself. Believing your thoughts, mistaking them for reality itself. Paying attention to something inside your head instead of paying attention to what’s here and now.

Fear holds the door shut. It is all about fear — of the unknown, of the uncontrollable, of pain.

When the door opens, you allow yourself to feel what’s happening. You are an aware intelligent animal — sensory, heartfelt, fearless. What’s happening “around” you is happening within you. You are the present. This is what presence is.

This is what religion and spirituality have invented words and concepts for (”God” being one). But when you are flooded with presence, you aren’t thinking “God.” Just like a fish doesn’t think “water.” There isn’t anything but.

The thinking about it, the name for it, comes only after, during the in-between times. The useless times.