The Practice of Awareness of Reality-II

     This practice is different from anything that I had ever encountered because it is not just about ideas and behavior. It is about experiencing a different kind of awareness, superior, objective toward one's experience, and immediate, not mediated by our thought. The vitality of life is present now, but if we are constantly processing our experience through our thought, we lose the essence.

     The essence of this practice is to actually experience awareness of reality. Merely thinking about the possibility is not different from thinking about anything else. 

     A person may have had such experiences accidentally, or even induced by certain drugs. This practice is about experiencing awareness intentionally. Accidents or "gifts" of awareness are fine, but I need to be able to access awareness of reality when I wish. How is this to be done? I have to learn to pay attention to awareness of reality. This is a dexterity that can be learned. You will confirm that for yourself when you actually learn it. An effort is required, not a physical effort but an effort of attention. How much effort does it take to intentionally pay attention to something? Not much, if you wish to do so. But one has to be clear what it is that one is attending to.

     One receives instructions of how to pay attention to awareness, and then one tries to follow them.

     I think that it is helpful to recognize that this is a question of one's own consciousness and one's own present experience. I am not trying to be aware of something that exists elsewhere or that is known only to experts. I am not trying to be aware of some theoretical description or of some cultural narrative that I have taken for granted all my life. I wish to experience impartial awareness of my own present reality. We can shorten that to "impartial awareness of now."

     I think that "now" is easier to understand than "impartial." For example, suppose that I now put my hand in my pocket. I think of doing it, I intend it, maybe visualize it, and now I do it. I write now. My hands move over this keyboard like squirrels busy on some errand. I wish to be aware of now. A lot of different processes are going on in my experience now. It is easiest to focus on some physical act or happening, a present happening. Breathing is good, you are always breathing, although one pauses in this process usually, because we don't need that much oxygen unless we are really exerting ourselves. Or one can focus on any other physical action, movement, gesture, posture, facial expression, tone of voice, as Mr. Nyland recommended, maybe something that you do intentionally as a focus for trying to experience awareness. You have to be aware of your behavior simultaneous with its taking place. That is the meaning of now. No description, no criticism. It doesn't matter whether your thoughts continue to describe and criticize, as they do habitually. What you are trying to do, if you follow this instruction, is to put your attention on some physical behavior now, on simultaneous awareness of that behavior. Your thoughts do not need your attention at the moment. They can play by themselves.

     We are not very familiar with trying to intentionally direct our attention. You will find that your attention wanders. Gently bring it back. Do this as long as you wish. This is just for you. It is no one else's business.

     If you are able to direct your attention onto some physical behavior of yours, so that you are aware of that behavior simultaneously, you have learned to pay attention to simultaneous awareness of reality. If you are really able to do this, you will also experience impartiality. 

     One must learn the flavor of impartiality by experience. It is not detachment. Detachment is an illusion. Everything is attached to everything. Our experience is whole. Impartiality is awareness of the whole of our experience, at a given moment or time. This is impossible for our thought, obviously. As Gurdjieff might have said, it is like trying to jump over your own knees. If you are thinking about anything, you are not thinking about something else. But reality includes everything that can be thought about, and also that which is experienced but cannot be grasped by thought. Our thought cannot be aware of reality, but even the concept of impartial awareness is difficult.

     Each person really has to learn this for oneself by one's own practice. Mr. Nyland tried to show us the way, of course, as I am trying to show you the way. Some of his hints didn't seem to be very helpful to me, at least in the short run. In some forms of Zen Buddhism, people meditate on insoluble verbal problems, called koans. Confrontation of our consciousness with its intolerable limitations can result in an experience of awareness. Impartial and simultaneous awareness of reality is possible for a person. I have experienced this many, many times and so can you.

              "This is for all the lonely people,

                Thinkin' that life has passed them by:

                Don't give up until you drink from a silver cup,

                Don't give up until you try."

     Mr. Nyland used to explain that impartiality may be understood as "no liking or disliking," and also that it represents freedom of awareness from feeling, as simultaneity represents freedom from thought. I really didn't find either of these hints very helpful, despite making every effort to utilize them. However, he did offer another kind of hint that I did find very useful, at a definite point. This hint related to the concept of "God." I was inoculated against this concept by various experiences in my youth, so that any mention of the word "God" constituted a verbal signal to me which might be translated as "ignore the following." Incidentally, I would like to express the opinion that whoever cooked up the notion that God is a person should suffer the same fate as whoever cooked up the notion that a corporation is a person. Whatever horrible punishment that might be, it would be accompanied by a chorus of victims of these ideas, screaming: "Idiot! Idiot!"

     Regardless of all preconceptions, God, the consciousness and creator of all that is, is impartial toward me and toward my consciousness, toward this little one being of all the immense sacred mystery that is reality. God isn't concerned about the details of my experience. He (God isn't a person, but he is personal, for all persons) actually knows it all, the whole trip. He isn't impressed or repelled. He views me with unconditional positive regard, as he views all his creation. At a certain point, the realization that impartiality is equivalent to awareness of God's presence helped me to understand impartiality. You know that God is omnipresent by definition, don't you? God is present now. Wake up.

The Practice of Awareness of Reality-I

     One learns this practice from someone else. I learned from Willem Nyland, who was a long-time student and disciple of the famous and somewhat notorious G.I. Gurdjieff. Mr Nyland called this practice Gurdjieff Work or Work on oneself. As you see, I am calling it something different. The practice that I am discussing here is the same that I learned from Mr. Nyland. Perhaps I should call it "Nyland Work," except that I don't want to cause Mr. Nyland to roll over in his grave. 

     I have definite reasons for calling this practice by this new name. I don't think that associating it with the personality of Mr. Gurdjieff or his mostly self-proclaimed disciples is helpful, and it is actually misleading. This practice is about your real life and about the reality and truth of existence. It has nothing to do with glorification or denigration of any personality whatsoever. All practices represent some form of "work on oneself." This one represents a particular kind of work, work on your own consciousness. The means by which one works is by practicing awareness of reality. The trouble with our consciousness is that we are NOT simultaneously and impartially aware of reality. You can work on your consciousness until you die, but unless your work is guided by actual awareness of reality, you will simply be transforming stupidity into stupidity. I believe that we will awaken when we die. I would prefer not to awaken to the realization that I have spent my life wandering in a house of mirrors. Mr. Nyland used to tell an anecdote of the philosopher on his deathbed. "Nur Eine.." he murmurs. Only one, that is, himself, has truly understood his philosophy. Suddenly he sits up. "Nein, Keine," and dies. No, he hasn't understood it either.

     At a certain point, back in 1970, I understood what this practice was about. At that point there was a powerful magnetic attraction. I was drawn to it, and I stuck, and have remained attached to this practice. It isn't the personality of Mr. Gurdjieff to which I became attached, not the society of his followers, nor his ideas.

     Jesus advised people to "build your house on a rock." Reality is the foundation of our existence, but we do not know reality. We know our thinking. As it happened, various past experiences, including traits of my individuality and the way I was brought up, the kind of family that we had and our local culture, had given me a precocious appreciation of the inadequacy of our thinking as a guide for living. I understood this both theoretically and by painful experience of my own stupidity,  despite my "brightness," education and the seriousness of my need to figure out my life. All my thinking wasn't helping me very much, and I already knew enough, for example about politics, philosophy, psychology and religion, to doubt whether any amount of understanding and experimentation with other people's ideas was going to make much difference. I had already experimented with ideas a great deal.

     Many people don't understand this: we are all philosophers, psychologists, and theologians. Culture embodies ideas about what reality is. We learn these ideas from infancy, and we are hypnotized by them. We take these stories for reality.

     I cannot neglect to mention that I had also had some profound experiences with L.S.D. It is undoubtedly very difficult for a person to appreciate the obvious necessity of a radical shift in our consciousness, who has never personally experienced a radical shift in one's consciousness. L.S.D. proved to me for sure that an entirely different kind of consciousness is possible for a person, such as me. Moreover, it was evident that in true openness to life as we actually experience life, our familiar world, the world of our cultural stories, the world that we know so well and may be sick to death of, would vanish like a dream,  to be replaced by reality in its infinite, sacred vitality. Obviously frequent or prolonged dosing with L.S.D. not only has "diminishing returns," but also can and does produce various harmful side effects. Some people have experienced harmful side effects from even one experience with it.  After discovering this practice, I had no further use for L.S.D.

     My response to this practice, when I actually understood what these people were talking about, was: "this is it." Sometimes I have compared it in my imagination to the reaction of the shepherds who, reportedly, witnessed angels singing near a stable in Bethlehem. A new reality has been revealed, and you act accordingly, of course. "Uh, I'm kinda tired tonight, maybe tomorrow." No, when the angels sing, you get up now.

     As it happened, the potential value of this practice, the promise of it, was very obvious to me back in 1970. For various reasons, some of which I understand, it doesn't seem so obvious to many other people. They don't hear the angels singing. But this intuition or conviction really isn't required. The point is to try to experience awareness of reality. You can try this experiment without having the conviction that your life depends on it.

     Obviously everyone has one's own understanding of this and everything else. To me, it seems that many people, even some long-time followers of nominally the same practice, are more or less muddled in their sense of just what the trouble with our consciousness is. In the extreme case, which is most common, one imagines that the state of our consciousness is fine, so long as we are "oriented," not too psychotic, and have vestiges of memory. To quote Professor Pangloss, "This is the best of all possible worlds.." Oh yes, just look how clever we are.

     If we- those of us who actually reach the point of trying this practice- experienced full-blown, enduring awareness of reality as an immediate result of our efforts, these differences in understanding wouldn't be important, but this is not the case. One has to work correctly and persistently to experience awareness reliably. It takes time to learn this dexterity. In order to experience awareness that endures, one has to work continuously. It takes even more time to learn that dexterity, and even when one begins to acquire the skill, there is still the need for the will, and where does the will come from? It comes from a clear understanding of the necessity for awareness of reality in my life. So I am trying to emphasize that necessity in presenting this practice for your consideration and experimentation. It is what this is about and why this practice exists.

     Ideas are cheap, and there is an infinite variety of them. They all lead us down some path of imagination, and lead us to focus our attention in some partial way. People believe in all kinds of things. Now we have the Internet, available to the masses. Everyone has access to ideas from all over the world, of interest to and believed in by someone, probably by millions of people, since there are several thousands of millions of us cavorting on this patient planet of ours.

     All philosophies and all religions encourage us to adopt certain ideas and beliefs. They all have their selling points and their weaknesses. This is true of all religions, also atheism and agnosticism. "You pays your money-that is, your attention- and you takes your choice." There was a song popular in the late Sixties, sung by Peggy Lee:

              "Is that all there is?

                Is that all there is?

                If that's all there is, my friend, then let's keep dancing.

                Let's break out the booze, and have a ball,

                If that's all there is."

     If the kind of consciousness that we have is all there is. There are serious problems with the state of our consciousness. We are unaware of what we are and what we need, and we focus our attention in stupid ways that bring suffering to us and others. Of course we want change, but a change in politics, philosophy or religion isn't going to change the basic fact that we are stupid! A change in our consciousness is necessary, not just a change in belief or ideas.

     We don't think about our consciousness. We don't criticize our consciousness. Obviously, we need some guidance in that, since we are our consciousness. We really aren't our bodies. Our bodies are objects. We are our experience. One trouble with the kind of consciousness that we have is that we are susceptible to believing in nonsense. If we did not have consciousness, none of our experience would exist. Human life would not exist. Robotic activities of bodies do not constitute human life, although of course our experience is the experience of having a human body. 

     It is only possible to criticize our consciousness fairly and justly from the standpoint of impartial and simultaneous awareness of reality. Mr. Nyland liked to use the term "objective" as opposed to our usual subjective consciousness. It was really somewhat confusing. Of course our consciousness is subjective, and it will always be subjective. We are the objects who are also subjects. The idea that I could be genuinely objective toward anything, anyone or the universe is absurd. I am in relation with all that is. But if I can experience impartial, simultaneous awareness, that awareness is objective toward my own consciousness. This kind of objectivity is possible for a person. We don't have it, but we need it.

Why?

     The reason for being interested in this practice is that we are not perfectly satisfied with our lives. Sometimes we are very dissatisfied. For example, many of us have thought of suicide at times. That is a sure indicator that a person is finding life very frustrating at the moment.

     We have needs, like all living organisms. That could be a definition of being alive. Life means having needs. We human beings have extraordinary capacities for getting our needs met. If we were plants we would just have to take what we get, but we have these wonderful bodies that can move and behave in all kinds of ways to "pursue happiness." We have feelings and emotions to guide us in our pursuit, and most remarkable of all, we have our human consciousness. We are aware of reality, we know what's going on. But "aye, there's the rub." We think that we know what's going on, but unless one's awareness is impartial and simultaneous, one is not actually aware of reality. We are partially aware. Partial awareness is not good enough.

     There are some needs of ours that seem to be similar to those of other animals, say cats or dogs. Often those animals seem to be better at getting their needs met than we are. Our consciousness, dominated by our thinking, is only resulting in us living more stupidly than "dumb" animals. Something is not right, and the something is our consciousness.

     We are able to do anything, any behavior within the capacity of our body to get our needs met. Let's assume that we are doing our best, and will continue to do our best as long as we live. When we are dissatisfied, our best doesn't seem to be good enough for us. We feel that somehow we could and must do better. We are able to think about how we could do better, and to act on our conclusions. Let's assume that we do think seriously about how we should live and do act on our conclusions, and that we will continue to do so. 

     Our thinking has a partial focus, inevitably. That is the nature of our thinking, which is intimately associated with language. Language consists of narratives, all of which focus our attention partially. We need impartial awareness of reality to guide us in our choices of how we should think and behave. Ultimately all our choices come down to how we should direct our attention. The practice of awareness of reality is the direction of our attention to impartial and simultaneous awareness of reality. The ability to direct our attention in this way is a dexterity that must be learned by practice, based on the wish to learn it. The reason that we wish this is that we know we need better guidance in our lives than our thinking can provide. Our thinking is a good servant, but a bad master.

     We humans have needs that other animals do not have, exactly because we do have our human consciousness. For example, we know that we will die, and that every other creature that we see will too.  My Grandpa died, slowly, of cancer when I was 12. It was like a bowling ball crashing through our family. What is the meaning of all our struggle? Other animals have no need to grapple with such questions, but we do. And no verbal formulation will really satisfy as an answer, I don't care whether it comes from the Bible or the works of Mr. Darwin.

     We need to be aware of reality. Then, at that moment, we have no need to ask "why."

What is Awareness of Reality?

     Human beings have various attributes. For instance, we all have a head, a brain, a mouth, a heart. We also all have consciousness, or at least anyone who reads this does.

     Consciousness is not an unimportant human attribute. It is our experience of life. Every individual has one's own experience, our subjectivity. The experience of a person is not observable by others. Behavior, of course, is observable. Every person experiences one's own behavior, as well as the behavior of others, and of all objects. We have a unique perspective on our own behavior. Only we personally are able to compare our conscious experience with our behavior. Only we experience our motivations, intentions, perceptions. We are the only ones who can really say "what we knew, and when we knew it."

     In fact, consciousness is the most important human attribute. Our experience is our life, although we know that our body is the vehicle of our experience. It appears logically that when our hearts stop, our experience must stop. We really don't want to accept that. Awareness of reality is the path of discovery of what one is. It is stepping across the frontier and into now, into the realm of the Uncertainty Principle, where no dogma guides or limits us at that moment.

     Any choice about anything depends on our consciousness-what to do, next week or right now; what to think; how I should feel about anything; and the essence of free will, how I should direct my attention. So it is very remarkable how little attention this basic reality of ours receives. We just take our consciousness for granted. We pay attention to everything else.

     I wish to consider this question: am I aware of reality? If I am awake, conscious, then I am aware of something, I am having experience. But am I aware of reality?

     What is reality, for me? Reality is present, both the present moment and present experience. It is that which I am presently experiencing. Reality is whole, the totality of my present experience. Awareness of reality must be simultaneous with one's present experience and it must be impartial, that is, whole.

     It is immediately apparent that any kind of thought about or description of reality does not meet these criteria. And our thought about our lives is dominant in our consciousness, much more dominant than we realize. Our consciousness is totally entangled with our stories about who we are, where we are, what is going on, what we hope for, what we hope to avoid, etc., etc. Those stories are actually confused with and called reality. And if anyone asks what reality is, we are compelled to answer with a story, if we respond verbally. According to legend, the great Zen masters responded otherwise on occasion. Storytelling is the nature of language. Nobody is suggesting that we should try to forget language, undoubtedly the greatest of human inventions. But there is no requirement that our consciousness has to be completely fascinated and hypnotized by these stories that we tell others and others tell us, even if they continue to run through our mind constantly, most often automatically and unconsciously, maybe in the form of fantasy. We don't have to pay attention to these thoughts of ours. They are just little aspects of our present reality. Our world does not revolve around our thoughts, even if we imagine that it does.

     In order to understand what awareness of reality is, one has to have some experience of this kind of awareness. Fortunately, we do, but this experience is exceptional and we usually ignore it. For example, a physical accident of some kind such as a fall may produce awareness at that moment. Any situation in which intense alertness is required may produce moments of awareness of reality, such as combat or childbirth, or skydiving, bungee jumping or extreme surfing. This kind of experience may be precipitated by an unusual train of thought, an unusual perception, very intense physical effort, or spiritual exaltation. L.S.D. and similar drugs can produce awareness of reality.

     We really don't know what to make of such accidental experiences. This practice is about the possibility of an alchemical transformation of our consciousness, transmuting the lead that we have into the gold that we need. Awareness of reality is the Philosophers' Stone.

How to Begin

     You exist in reality at the present moment. Now you wish to be mindful of your existence.

     Your thoughts can continue, but at the present time you don't want to pay attention to your thoughts. You think about reality all the time, but now you just want to pay attention to awareness of reality. 

     You want this awareness to be impartial, that is whole, the whole of reality as experienced by you now. You want to be completely open to life as it is now. Never mind what you like or what you don't like. Is it possible that something in you can accept that which is, as is? Can you pay attention to that awareness? We are responding to reality at every moment and you continue to respond. If you can remain aware of reality, you are responding consciously at that time.

     Put your attention on now and try to keep your attention on now as you are breathing. Try to remain aware during one whole breath. When your attention wanders, bring it back to now. Give this your best effort.

     Our thought is accustomed to having our attention, like a spoiled child. If your thought is demanding, try doing something unusual with your body, something non-habitual that will not attract the attention of others. If you are alone you can make unusual and unnecessary movements, make faces, tense and relax muscles, speed up or slow down habitual behavior, do things twice unnecessarily. Making a change in your habitual behavior will draw your attention from your thought to your body at the moment of making the change. This produces a small moment of awareness.

     Try these experiments at quiet times first, for example when you are just getting up in the morning. Try it at simple times. This is not a practice of multi-tasking. Do this when you have all your attention for this one experiment.

     Can you actually experience awareness of reality? Let me know your results.

Introduction

     People experience mental distress, sometimes more, sometimes less. It is obvious that this has a function. It alerts us that significant needs of ours are not being met. The natural and adaptive outcome would be that we would mobilize all our resources to remedy this deprivation. This is observed regularly in animals, but in people the response to mental distress is much more complicated and often seems to be much less adaptive. 

 

     People's needs are more complicated than those of animals. Partly it is because our understanding of our needs is much more complicated. Animals do not appear to have any understanding of their needs at all. They just experience them and respond, usually appropriately. Our thinking complicates life for us. 

     Some of our mental distress is as simple as animals'. We also get hungry. Fleas bite us too. There is no mystery about it. For distress that is more complicated, we need to work our way out of it, work for satisfaction. But how? 

     Since we think, and since our mental distress and satisfaction are very important to us, we construct rationales for why we experience distress and how we need to work to be happy. I call these rationales, and the work that they motivate and justify, "practices". People need practices, because we do experience mental distress and we do think, and people do have practices. The crucial question is, how are your practices working for you?

     For many people the answer is, "not so well". For others, their practices are so inadequate for them that they have become "dead in the water", sinking in their distress, inactive although activity is obviously essential. Such people may become involved with the so-called "mental health" system. "Mental illness" system, I often call it. This putative "system" encourages people to put their hopes in experts and medication, rather than in their own work. It is too passive. What we need is meaningful activity.

     I have been involved with a certain practice for more than 40 years. It has advantages, particularly in complicated cases like mine. At the same time it can coexist with other practices that are working for a person. Don't give up what works! But if your practices are not giving you enough satisfaction, I suggest that you explore the practice of awareness of reality with me.