Slogan #3
Examine the nature of awareness
This slogan is the second of five ultimate or absolute truths of compassion and is one of Buddhism’s fundamental philosophical tenets. The previous slogan asks that we regard everything as a dream rather than solidifying, grasping, or over-identifying with the world out there. With slogan #3, we turn our focus inwards with the same gentle curiosity to look at the looking itself. When you look at your own mind, what do you see? And what is the nature of that seeing—where does it abide and where does it go? Who or what is perceiving the world? What experiences everything as a dream? What is awareness exactly and what is its history and nature? Unfortunately, there isn’t an area in the brain that corresponds to “I.” This slogan asks whether the “I” and our identity are nothing but the armour that we’ve created around our bodhicitta hearts; that is, our awareness simply consists of passing memories, thoughts, and emotions and is not solid at all. Cultivate a process that moves from complacency to curiosity to the ability to sit with complexity to compassionate agency. Accepting that everything is a dream is unsettling enough but this is both unnerving and freeing!
These two slogans go hand in hand and invalidate our attempts to establish both inner and outer solidity. Ultimate or absolute consciousness is that all-pervasive knowing or pure awareness that cannot be limited to one single being. This is a practice of letting go and opening up, of awakening your heart and softening your fixed view of a small self. Consciousness is alive in the spaciousness of energetic potential that gives rise to thoughts and emotions. Continue to rest in the looking. Learn to embrace paradox. Be both dispassionate and inquisitive. See with your compassionate heart. Create space around what is difficult and shaky in order to find wisdom and clarity. Stay awake to the rawness of pure experience.
The 13th-century poet Rumi describes two kinds of intelligence:
There are two kinds of intelligence: one acquired, as a child in school memorizes facts and concepts from books and from what the teacher says, collecting information from the traditional sciences as well as from the new sciences.
With such intelligence you rise in the world. You get ranked ahead or behind others in regard to your competence in retaining information. You stroll with this intelligence in and out of fields of knowledge, getting always more marks on your preserving tablets.
There is another kind of tablet, one already completed and preserved inside you. A spring overflowing its springbox. A freshness in the center of the chest. This other intelligence does not turn yellow or stagnate. It’s fluid, and it doesn’t move from outside to inside through the conduits of plumbing-learning. This second knowing is a fountainhead from within you, moving out.
Journaling Prompts
“If we don’t do our work, then we become work for other people.” Lama Rod Owens
Apply the practice of compassion to your commitment to awakening. Be direct. Personal. Simple. In this way, compassion is both a practice and the effect of your practice.
We are on shaky ground when we contemplate the fact that our existence is constantly shifting and insubstantial. Given this, what are your distractions?