The Universal Nature of Practice

Meditation and Daily Life

Our intrinsic unsullied awareness can be defined as being untouched by anything in our created samsaric world and is limitless, unlike our ordinary awareness that is forever limited by the dualistic samsaric world we create out of ignorance and confusion. We must also be careful not to imagine our intrinsic awareness as somehow being a thing, or indeed not-a-thing either. The fruit of this practice when finally matured and our hearts fully open, will be to return to the warmth, love and wisdom of our unborn, undying, pure intrinsic awareness. We will pass beyond duality and the delusion of life and death, to eternal peace.

This type of practice can stand either on its own, or it can support and penetrate any conventional form of practice that we as Dharma practitioners may apply to the personal transforming and humanising process that we undertake. Firstly, let's look at it on its own.

What makes this practice particularly challenging is that it employs no themes or concepts of any description. In meditation there is no focal point or anything to 'hold on' to. When we sit we learn through mirror-like reflective awareness to be simply present and alive to ourselves in totality. We become aware of all experiences coming through our senses.

Because we sit with our eyes half open we are aware of the light and whatever else is in front of us. We are aware of the sound of the car on the road outside. We are aware of the breath that touches our nostrils as it enters our body. We are aware of the smell of incense that burns and helps to create a conducive atmosphere. We are aware of our emotional state that brings awareness of the physical body. Finally, we become aware of our thoughts as they mysteriously rise and pass away unceasingly in our mind. We become aware of our totality, as we are in the moment, and neither chase or grasp at any of it. Just being awake, alive and aware.

This is how we enter the reflective nature of awareness on the cushion. But it is vital to know that as we cultivate the ability to return to our natural free and unsullied awareness (being alive and at one with whatever we are doing), the lion's share of the practice is not done on our cushion at all, but in our daily life and the countless experiences we have throughout each day. It is essential that we contemplate this fact and be prepared to accept that there is no other way of pursuing this most direct and straightforward way of practice in Buddhism. We can work with many other forms of meditation practice that can give the impression that they are essentially to be practised on the cushion, and for the most part forgotten when off it, but this form of practice does not permit any compromise on the four postures.

We take the model learned on the cushion - of being alive and aware to all our experiences without being caught by our habitual karmic conditioning of labelling and grasping - and then bring into our daily life. We simply open ourselves to the experience, contain it without those labels and grasping, and continue to engage with what we happen to be engaged with at the moment.

If you learn to see the subtle 'non-doing' nature of this practice, see no difference in its application regardless of your posture, and train yourself within that understanding, then you need to go no further. The 'spirit' of unconditioned awareness is one of being wholly and completely at one with our experience in the moment. This means we are not observing, so creating a dualistic experience. We are so intimate with the moment that we cannot say there is either a person or any doing, yet we are spacious of mind and still aware of the environment that we are in. It is here we are one with the mysterious spontaneity of life. This is a profound state of being that if maintained will take us to Buddhahood.

Enriching Conventional Practices

It is always good to see practitioners give the meditation practice of open, reflective and direct awareness a wholehearted try. But if in time, because of its paradoxical subtle and direct nature it proves too difficult, we may need to put in place a more conventional form of practice (e.g. any of those mentioned below), one that suits our needs and temperament. With our conventional practice now in place, and coupled with a willingness to incorporate it into the cultivation of open and direct awareness, is where the spirit of our practice group comes into the picture, and how we learn the cultivation of the Dharma Mind that makes this rounded practice, both on and off the cushion, possible.

Since our group started a few years ago it would be hard for me to estimate exactly how many different meditation practices people have brought with them to the meetings. All, I am sure, have been the usual forms of dualistic (subject/object) practices from anapanasati (mindfulness of breathing) to metta bhavana (loving-kindness), the ti-lakkhanas (three signs of being), various visualisation practices, and more. How, you may ask, is it possible to help practitioners with such a diverse collection of practices without causing utter confusion? Unless invited to do so, it has always been my way not to get involved with people's specific meditation practices and tinker with them, but rather suggest ways to broaden and enrich what they already have in place. And the way I do this is to introduce a non-conceptual, non-dualistic practice that leads directly to our eternal perfect inner-nature, yet can readily accommodate traditional meditation themes and conceptual practices at the same time.

In essence gradually awakening to our free and natural open awareness is not a dualistic practice, therefore there is no doer. Yet we need to learn to contain and reflect on, in the subtlest of ways, all of our attachments. We can use our conventional practice as a focal point and something to hold on to, yet we do not see this practice as being an end in itself, rather a 'skilful means' or stepping stone. Because there is no doer there can be no goal, only practice for its own sake. It is without desire for reward. What can also be said is that it is full of paradox.

It needs a wholehearted uninterrupted commitment to practice in order to be able to 'practice a practice of no-practice'. In order to learn to be comfortable with paradox it becomes necessary to nurture a wholly different approach from the usual reward-orientated dualistic one, and to achieve this we need to nurture the subtle Dharma Mind.

It is not possible to define what this state of Dharma Mind and training is in terms of a formula or even metaphysics. Instead, I would rather describe it more in terms of being a spirit that we bring to our new, more-rounded practice. A spirit of full-time courageous wholeheartedness, and faith and trust to surrender ourself to something that is beyond 'me', and deeply mysterious. Because the nature of this practice is non-dual it therefore is marked by emptiness (shunyata). It is because of its empty nature it can be practised on its own. Yet paradoxically, because of its basic empty nature, it can also enrich, support and penetrate all other practices simultaneously.

My second book, Dharma Mind Worldly Mind, describes a framework for this rounded practice, along with how we bring life to this framework, so that we grow into the Dharma Mind, and the richness of fulfilment.