About twenty years ago I noticed something about my mind that seemed extraordinarily important to me for spiritual seekers, but to my surprise I couldn’t find more than partial mentions of it in spiritual literature.
After reading and skimming many books over a period of about five years, I managed to find partial mentions in three places, two of which are pretty obscure: a book chapter by Buddhist psychologist Susan Blackmore; a few pages in a book by P.D. Ouspensky; and a paragraph in a book by Anadi (Krzysztof Jerzy Strzelecki).
(Brian, if you’re here, this is what got me interested in Anadi.)
I probably failed to look in the right places, and I probably overlooked discussions of this phenomenon because I misunderstood them, but I spent a lot of time looking and that’s all I found. I kept thinking, “This should be better known. Somebody should describe this in writing and publish it. Since I can’t find any such descriptions I should write one myself and put it on the Internet.”
But I was reluctant to do this because I didn’t consider myself to be an expert on spiritual matters. (I still don’t but I’ve grown less cautious about publishing.)
I kept thinking these thoughts for about five years and then finally I wrote the article. By that time I had been publishing realization.org for seven years but I didn’t feel comfortable putting my opinions there so I created a new website, this one, and put the new article here. For the next eight years it was the only article on this site. It’s still on the home page. I now realize that the article is wrong or seriously incomplete in at least one significant way but I haven’t bothered to revise it because as a practical matter, it’s very helpful to seekers in its current form. Its flaws don’t interfere with its usefulness.
Here’s what I noticed twenty years ago. There are four main points:
- In my normal, ordinary waking state I’m unconscious because I’m lost in thought. In that state I don’t even know the thoughts I’m thinking. I’m so unconscious that I know my thoughts only in retrospect. This has been my state in almost every waking moment during my entire life until now.
- I occasionally snap out of that lost-in-thought state spontaneously for a very brief time and enter what I called “the aware state” in the article. It’s only when that happens and I become conscious that I realize by contrast that my normal state is one of unconsciousness. If I hadn’t noticed this alternate state which serves as a basis of comparison, I would never have known that I am usually unconscious. This is why people are zombies and they don’t know it. I had been a zombie my whole life.
- It’s possible to learn to enter the aware state voluntarily. I suggested a method in my article and Susan Blackmore described a simpler one in her book. (I now realize that Gurdjieff’s “stopping exercises” were probably designed to produce this effect.)
- Saying that there are two states, a “lost in thought state” and an “aware state”, is an oversimplification. Actually there is a continuum. In other words, our sense of being conscious is really a matter of degree, like with temperature: there isn’t only hot and cold, there are also many temperatures in between. At one end of the continuum we are practically unconscious. At the other end we are extremely conscious.
One of these days I’ll update those observations. But today I just want to show you a satsang video that I stumbled across a few years ago in which one of Francis Lucille’s students describes most of what I just said and asks Lucille’s opinion. I was startled when I ran across this video because the student reminds me so much of myself. He has noticed exactly what I noticed and like me, he thinks it’s extremely important. In twenty years, this is the only video or book I’ve run across that gives me this impression.
(The student uses different words and concepts than I did to describe the phenomenon, but he is describing the same thing. This is a good opportunity to practice looking beyond words and concepts to that which they describe, which is an extremely valuable intellectual ability.)
Lucille’s reaction: Both those states are mental phenomena. They are not a direct experience of Brahman. He uses different terminology — at one point he calls Brahman “the receiver in chief” — but that’s what he means. However he thinks the gap (his word for something closely related to the “snapping out” that I described in point 2 above) is significant for a different reason than the one I gave.
This is an extremely meaty conversation and well worth listening to until the end. Some of it may seem overly intellectual but it’s not all like that.
This reminds me of Franklin Merell Wolff’s Consciousness Without an Object
https://www.merrell-wolff.org/fmw/aphorisms
“…you can get into an infinite regression. You look at your ego, all right here am I? It all of a sudden dawns upon you that that which is looking at the ego is really the “I.” So you stick that one out in front and you look at it again, but then you realize it couldn’t be because here’s the something that is observing it. At last it finally dawns that I am that which is never an object before consciousness. And mayhap at that moment in your analysis the heavens will open.”
It seems to me that we often mistake the “aware state” for the Self, as the neo-Advaitins do.
Hi Louise,
Yep, I agree.
Thanks for reminding people about this stupendous book. I don’t think there’s anything like it in spiritual literature except maybe his other book. 🙂
My God, you and I continue to be on the same track. 🙂 I read that paragraph again and again at a certain stage of my practice because I encountered that difficulty when I started to do Ramana’s method and I hoped the “mayhap” would happen to me and solve the problem.
For me, that regression was an earlier stage than what I wrote about above. The stuff I wrote above was my attempt to find an alternative to the regression.
Hi Freddie
Thanks for the beautiful response. I also hoped the “mayhap” would happen here – and listened from time to time to Wolff’s laborious induction talk rather fruitlessly. Somehow – the method here always reminded me of Ramana’s “death” investigation – which I often try, also fruitlessly – other than a mysterious clarifying without final result.
Wolff’s piece helped me to bypass the infinite regression by surrendering to the Great Mystery and ignore the mind’s attempts to create endless objects in consciousness.
In this video, Joel Morwood (who lived and studied with Wolff for years) explains his method and provides context and a shorter guided meditation of Wolff’s induction): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hraixKxOgc&t=3990s
I have also always been fascinated by the little known mystic Edward Salim Michael – who had very precise and rather odd “exercises” to build stability in the aware state. I wonder if you have stumbled upon him? You probably have because he was French. I have read his works translated into English, and found his insights clear, but his methods a bit bizarre. Here’s a little snippet:
“As human beings are ordinarily, because of a very curious state of absence to themselves in which they generally passe their life, it is impossible for them to suspect that when they wake from their nocturnal sleep, they nevertheless continue to sleep, only in a different way, which eludes them.”
https://www.testimoniesawakening.com/awakening-of-edward-salim-michael/edward-salim-michael-awakening-and-remaining-awakened/
If these two references add clutter to the discussion, please do delete this comment. I love the curated clarity of the blog, and have no wish to obscure this, even if unintentionally.
Lovely to hear you spring to life here again – you always inspire me to practice and clear up spots of sometimes unnoticed confusion.
Namaste
Hi Louise,
It’s truly wonderful to be talking to you again.
Same here except I managed to get through it only once. There’s a student of Richard Rose named Shawn Nevins who says in his book that he had an extremely significant experience — I think maybe he thinks he got realized — while reading a transcript of it.
Did you and I ever talk about how you got interested in Merrell-Wolff? If we did and I’ve forgotten, my apologies, my memory isn’t aging well. If not, I’d love to hear about it.
I may not remember the talk or my reaction accurately, but isn’t his method plain old neti-neti until suddenly “mayhap”? Am I misremembering? Neti-neti never got me anywhere (although it’s helpful to understand it intellectually) because I was never able to make the jump from what I am not to what I am. That’s what I needed help with. If M-W could have given that help in words, wouldn’t it have appeared where he wrote “mayhap”?
I think Ramana’s death experience must have been what he later codified and prescribed in “Who Am I?” although it doesn’t sound like it from the bad descriptions we have (you probably know that our main record of the death experience consists of paraphrased notes that his first biographer took in English while Ramana described what happened in Tamil).
If so, I think Ramana did give us the pointer that M-W replaces with “mayhap.” It’s the pointer to look at that which we would be led to if we said “I” over and over, which is just a very clear way of saying what he always said about his method. Didn’t M-W describe somewhere else the moment of his first realization as focusing on a point? A point, something condensed, compacted — doesn’t that sound like the way a mathematician’s mind might represent the ego to itself? (Doesn’t Adi Da call the ego a contraction?) At one moment, that point is nothing — it’s like the place where the optic nerve joins the retina, invisible to vision — but then suddenly the nothing is everything to the new knowledge. If there are Michael Langford fans here, I invite them to ponder these things. I don’t trust what I’m about to write in this sentence because it’s so new for me, but I think maybe I suddenly understood this aspect of Ramana’s method experientially for the first time about two months ago — after attempting to implement it for a quarter century. That’s why I started blogging again.
Thanks, I’ll watch it as soon as I finish answering comments. It sounds like you know more about M-W than I do which is exciting for me. You may be the only person I know who has much interest in him.
I haven’t but I will look into him, thanks.
I’m glad to know the blog has a curated clarity. I didn’t know that but I agree that it’s a good thing. Maybe that results mostly from the posts, not from the comments, and we can be very free with comments without sabotaging the clarity. I think your comments are at least as valuable as mine so I want to say, “Please, say anything you want here.”
Thank you. 🙂 I’m glad to hear that. I’m very glad you are here.
P.S. Louise, have I given the impression that I’m French? I’m American. (Sometimes people think I’m Chinese — “Freddie Yam” is a pseudonym.)
Well that shatters the image of the incogniti mystic wandering the streets of Paris with a baguette. Not sure how I came up with that impression 🙂
Louise, didn’t we tell each other about walks we both took? There was a lot of similarity in our stories but I forget what it was exactly. Part of my story was seeing a mouse eating bread inside a bakery window. Maybe you pictured a French bakery with baguettes? I was actually on 57th St. in Manhattan.
I’m not an expert, but isn’t it true that Rupert Spira also appreciates the same thing?
Hi Vrazz. I haven’t heard Rupert Spira saying the four points I summarized above but I know only a little bit about his teachings. I don’t think he had published anything yet during the period I was discussing above (2001-2007).
Somebody please correct me if I’m wrong.
I believe I remember that a part of Spira’s self-inquiry practice involves frequently asking oneself, ‘Am I aware?’ That’s what I wanted to say. However, I must admit that I’m not precisely familiar with Spira’s practice.
Nevertheless, I find what you’re writing extremely interesting. I have encountered such or similar thoughts briefly. When I get the chance, I will write to you about it in the comments if you don’t mind.
A lot of people ask that question now but as far as I know, Susan Blackmore was the only person talking about it publicly at that time. It was a novelty at that time.
Moreover — this is the really important thing — Susan noticed that people are not conscious when they are not asking the question.
She noticed that asking the question makes us conscious.
For all I know she was the first person in history to notice that.
Of course! Please write anything you like.
Thank you for this.
Your experience of the wonder of becoming aware of awareness roughly parallels mine. I, too, was eager to find others who had woken to it and sought them to be my teachers. I did find some in writings and some in living people – including Ajahn Sumedho, Douglas Harding, Shaun de Warren, Anadi and others.
I’ve found awaking to it and becoming more and more established in it results in a deepening . . . which I and some other discoverers of it are still progressing along.
Thanks for the beautiful video of Lucille’s. It seemed to end in mid-sentence. What my sense is that he is describing is the witnessing field that underlies both the thoughts AND the gap between them, just as our listening is present during sound and silence.
Perhaps more significantly, our awareness remains when we are in deep sleep (as well as underlying the waking and dreaming states) and – during deep sleep – we will still react to a smoke alarm or the body’s call to use the bathroom.
As the great Vedic scriptures also tell us, this awareness is not personal and does not cease with the end of the body and nor did it begin with the birth of the body.
Thanks, Brian. I remember now that some of what you say came up in our early conversations when we first met. My memory has deteriorated so much, it’s a bit of a shock to realize how much has slipped away from me. Do you remember — I know you do — a book we discussed when we first met? I’m going to reread it before I answer you.
Hi,
I suspect you are referring the the book on AWA which you helped improve.
That is an incredibly powerful practice and should be a help to anyone.
I’ve since understood that there is a further step which is important for those of us still associated with a physical body. It is including EVERYTHING – so the awareness contains all that happens in our waking and dreaming state – as well as the awareness during deep sleep. The waking and dreaming worlds become mirrors reflecting ourselves back to us. Of course the reflections back are all maya or relative reality, rather than the absolute reality of awareness. There is an interpenetration of the relative and the absolute.
I’ve found this supported by my understanding of the 4th and last book in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras and also in the Zen stories/Koans of the levels of enlightenment like the Five Ranks of Tozan and the Ten Ox-herding Pictures.
Hi Brian,
I’m going to send you an email.
Freddie, I’d like to comment on the bold words in your paragraph # 2 please.
Ramana said in one of his talks that the goal is silence and the way is being still. If i recall correctly he quoted psalm 46:10 “Be still and know that I am god”. It’s a proverb that says it all in my mind’s eye, minus the word God which at least for me is unnecessary, as it adds nothing.
In this type of meditation, of being still, (which is quite similar to Zazen doing nothing or just being), I’ve found it very helpful to compare the stillness (also in eye movements) to unstill phenomenon such as the landscape seen in a moving train.
I see houses and cars and mountains flash by (plus thoughts and other noises) but I am totally Still. Present. I take in the changing scenery but remain the same at all times
In this way I grew to understand what is this I, this awareness, the difference between it and all other states, and how to tap into it more easily and for longer periods of time.
Is this comparison similar by nature to what you wrote about in paragraph #2?
Laura, please always feel free to post anything you like here.
Thanks, I’m going to write a blog post about this. 🙂
I think the part I just quoted is the same as what I described above. Do you think so too?
I cracked my head open with your question to me but still couldn’t understand what it meant and what could be the answer.
Three minutes later…
After serious Self-Examination/Exploration/Spotting/Gazing (synonyms of Self-Inquiry) and I still don’t get it, sorry ((;
Self-obsevation is also a good synonym
they all point to the watcher, the witness, the silent spectator, etc
….all I have “to do” is to be still
…can’t get any easiest than that…
Laura, I was only asking you the same question you asked me, “Is this comparison similar by nature to what you wrote about in paragraph #2?”
I was saying, “Yes, I think so. Do you think so too?”
But I was also saying that my answer was about that one paragraph of yours.