Awareness Fresh as a High Mountain Stream
If awareness was like a high mountain stream in mid summer, wouldn’t it be lovely to rest by the cool freshness of that high mountain stream?
The connection to awareness that we attentively explore and genially nurture in our seated meditation links to an awareness unprompted like that high mountain stream. Just like the whole of nature, this awareness is clear and fresh, constantly renewing and unprompted.
What’s more, we don’t have to travel to a high mountain to find it. If we’re awake, it is always already present. I wonder… do you wonder… Was this knowing quality in experience already here, even before our parents were born?
We make our meditation cushions and civilizations, but we don’t make this awareness. We don’t concoct or generate or fabricate how we know our own experience, how we experience experience. This knowing just happens whether we like it or not; it’s inseparable from the warp and weft of our experience. Yet, we can deepen and fortify our experience of this knowing quality of experience in meditation.
And, though experience may be always fleeting, much like a dream, it’s not a fantasy. Awareness seems to be one of life’s ways of calmly knowing its own constant arising and ceasing. It’s a mystery–this knowing– and a treasure and the strength of our awareness of moment to moment experience is a seed we can grow. If we keep at it, it may ripen into wisdom and compassion.
Put Your Burden Down
Once you’ve grown and strengthened your relationship with it, you can rest in this refreshing meditative awareness. This resting is simply choosing to reside in the ebb and flow of nature itself. With this zazen meditation, we rest without being distracted or carried away by any story, not even by our own story. We are free to respond wholeheartedly to life’s ups and downs.
Let go!
So, let go of your story, your explanation, your trouble. Isn’t your story where all your troubles lie in wait for you?
Let go. Be at ease. Trust. Put down your burden.
Open and simply watch and welcome each “thing” or event as it appears in the high mountain stream of awareness we call now.
What is the nature of this awareness? Is it possible to meet a measure of contentment in merely knowing how things flow just now?
If you let go, you might feel the difference this makes!
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