THE PRACTICE OF AWARENESS

Another helpful gem from Richard Rohr...

Question of the Day: How do I define awareness?

Religious teachers, including Jesus, the Buddha, and many Hindu sages, are always telling us wake up—to be alert, alive, awake, attentive, or aware. But what does this really mean?

Being conscious or aware means:
• I drop to a level deeper than the passing show.
• I become the calm seer of my dramas from that level.
• I watch myself compassionately from a little distance, almost as if the “myself” is someone else—a “corpse” as St. Francis put it.
• I dis-identify with my own emotional noise, and no longer let it pull me here and there, up and down.
• I stop thinking about this or that and “collapse into” pure consciousness of nothing in particular. You don’t get there, you fall there.

At first, it does not feel like “me,” and is even unfamiliar territory, because up to now I thought my thinking was “me,” yet now my thinking has ceased. This is the accurate meaning of Jesus’ teaching on “losing oneself to find oneself” in Luke 9:24.

From "The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See", p.135 Richard Rohr