We need to experience connectedness - and to act in ways that affirm it: making evident to ourselves and others that our existence is woven into expanding patterns, without which we cannot exist.
These methodologies of consciousness expansion counteract the second feature of trance: selective thinking.
The work of clearing our consciousness and becoming aware of our tendency to perceive life through paradigm filters has another positive component: the capacity to harmonize our awareness with the cosmos in which we live.
**
"I laugh when
I hear that the fish in the water is thirsty.
"You don't grasp the fact that what is most alive of all is inside your own
house;
and you walk from one holy city to the next with a confused look!
"Kabir will tell you the truth: go wherever you like, to Calcutta or Tibet;
if you can't find where your soul is hidden,
for you the world will never be real!"
-- Kabir, The Kabir Book: Forty-four of the Ecstatic Poems of Kabir
**
Meditation involves paying silent, "bare attention" to our thoughts, feelings, sensation, and intentions. An image that may capture this experience is considering ourselves as the clear water (awareness) in an aquarium, while our thoughts and other contents of consciousness are the colored fish that swim through this transparent water.
By keeping our awareness in the present moment and observing (rather than judging or identifying with) the contents of consciousness, we are enabled to see our repetitious preoccupations clearly. With moment-to-moment concentration we become the "observer," rather than the "thinker." As one of my early meditation teachers, Joseph Goldstein, once said, "Don't cling, don't condemn, don't identify. Just sit back and watch the passing show."
Finally, even the "witness" stance dissolves into a living process of awareness in the present moment. We see clearly the pain that our illusion of separateness causes in ourselves and others. Meditation opens the heart and intuitive centers. Slowly, with practice, we see through our trances, begin to loosen their hold, and finally break free of them. Compassion arises for all those still immersed in the trance of separateness, and gradually we become "loving awareness."
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