The Story of Awareness, Part Three

Author: Satguru Bodhinatha Veylanswami

Description: At Home on Kauai. Gurudeva leaves past history and properties to found Kauai Aadheenam. The study of awareness \"I am awareness; I am aware.\" Energy goes where awareness, an extension of prana, flows. The artful practice of yoga is to separate awareness from that which it is aware of, it then flows freely through all five states of mind in consciousness. Awareness, consciousness and mind! Awareness abiding in its essential nature is the result of awareness disuniting with mental activities remaining aware only of itself until thoughts arise again. The goal is to distinguish ourself from what is mental in the same way we distinguish ourself from what is physical. \"Master Course Trilogy, Merging with Siva\" Lessons 33,34. \"Guru Chronicles\". Patanjali Yoga Sutras, 1-4.

Transcription:
We are continuing with \"Merging with Siva\" Chapter 5 which is entitled \"The Story of Awareness\" and is drawn from \"The 1970 Master Course.\" And before we read the text we\'re looking at a story from \"The Guru Chronicles\" 1970. \"At Home on Kauai. \"Gurudeva named the lush seven-acre property Sivashram and made it his home, a courageous move in those days, leaving all past history and properties, moving thousands of miles away to a new land, a small island. Thus ended a long search for his spiritual headquarters. (And in his own words) “\'Years ago, we came to Kauai and finally never left. I chose Kauai, the world’s most remote land mass, because I wanted to be close to my devotees in the East and close to my devotees in the West, while at the same time cloistered from the world at large. Yes, our inner life is more important than our outer life. If we were in San Francisco, New York, Singapore or New Delhi, we could not do this same work as a contemplative order of meditators and teachers, outreaching primarily through publications and the Internet. Kauai is a spiritual place, a vortex of healing energies emanating from its sacred Mount Waialeale, pristine air and ocean.\' (Sounds pretty good. End of quote.) To keep in close touch with the careful planning needed to prepare for the upcoming Innersearch programs, he installed a teletype system between all three centers—Virginia City, San Francisco and Kauai. These large, metal typing stations brought great clarity to the pilgrimage planning and made communications across the sea and an overview of the many activities of the Church a much simpler matter. It was the email of its day, and could also serve as instant messaging if two or more were online together.\" So that\'s our first form of email there. Lesson 33 \"The Great Study of Awareness \"The study of awareness is a great study. \'I am aware.\' The key to this entire study is the discovery of who or what is the \'I am.\' It is the key to the totality of your progress on the path of enlightenment. What is awareness? As you open your physical eyes, what is it that is aware of what you see? When you look within, deep within, and feel energy, you almost begin to see energy. A little more perception comes, and you do actually see energy, as clearly as you see chairs and tables with your physical eyes open. \"But what is it that is aware? When awareness moves through superconsciousness, it seems to expand, for it looks out into the vastness of superconsciousness from within and identifies with that vastness. This is what is meant by an expanded state of awareness. What is awareness? Discover that. Go deep within it. Make it a great study. You have to discover what awareness is before you can realize the Self God. Otherwise, realization of the Self God is only a philosophy to you. It is a good philosophy, however, a satisfying and stable philosophy. But philosophies of life are not to be intellectually learned, memorized and repeated and nothing more. They are to be experienced, step by step by step. Get acquainted with yourself as being awareness. Say to yourself, \'I am awareness. I am aware. I am not the body. I am not the emotions. I am not the thinking mind. I am pure awareness.\' \"It will help for us to make a mental picture. Let us now try to visualize awareness as a round, white ball of light, like one single eye. This ball is being propelled through many areas of the mind, inner and outer, and it is registering all the various pictures. It has, in fact, four eyes, one on each side of it. It is not reacting. The reaction comes when awareness is aware of the astral body and the physical body. It is in those bodies that reaction occurs. We are aware of the reactions in these bodies, for the physical body and the astral body are also part of the vast, vast universe of the mind. \"Each individual awareness, ball of light, is encased in many bodies. The first and nearest encasement is the body of the soul. The second encasement is the astral, or intellectual-emotional, body. The third encasement is the physical body. The radiation from awareness, this ball of light, is the aura. Awareness is an extension of prāṇa from the central source, issuing energy. \"Energy goes where awareness flows. When awareness focuses on relationships, relationships flow. When awareness focuses on philosophy, that unfolds itself. Ultimately, when awareness focuses on itself, it dissolves into its own essence. Energy flows where awareness goes. I was always taught that if one foot was injured, for example, to focus on the other foot and transfer the healthy prāṇa from that foot to the ailing foot.\" Lesson 34 \"Awareness and Consciousness (This is a really great lesson, Lesson 34.) \"Consciousness and awareness are the same when awareness is totally identified with and attached to that which it is aware of. To separate the two is the artful practice of yoga. Naturally, the Shūm-Tyeīf language is needed to accomplish this. When awareness is detached from that which it is aware of, it flows freely in consciousness. A tree has consciousness. Awareness can flow into the tree and become aware of the consciousness of the tree. Consciousness and mind are totally equated as a one thing when awareness and consciousness are a one thing to the individual. But when awareness is detached from that which it is aware of, it can flow freely through all five states of mind and all areas of consciousness, such as plants and the Earth itself, elements and various other aspects of matter. Here we find awareness separate from consciousness and consciousness separate from the five states of mind attributed to the human being. In Sanskrit we have the word chaitanya for consciousness, and for awareness it is sākshin, meaning witness, and for mind the word is chitta. Consciousness, mind, matter and awareness experience a oneness in being for those who think that they are their physical body, who are convinced that when the body ends, they end and are no more. \"We have three eyes. We see with our physical eyes and then we think about what we have seen. Going into meditation, we see with our third eye our thoughts. Then we choose one or two of them and think about them and lose the value of the meditation. It is the control of the breath that controls the thoughts that emerge from the subconscious memory patterns. Once this is accomplished, and the iḍā, piṅgalā and sushumṇā merge, we are seeing with the third eye, which is the eye of awareness, wherever we travel through the mind, inside or outside of our own self. \"The minute awareness is attached to that which it is aware of, we begin thinking about what we were aware of. Controlling the breath again detaches awareness, and it flows to another area of the mind, as directed by our innate intelligence, this intangible superconscious, intelligent being of ourselves that looks out through the eye of awareness in a similar way as do the two eyes of the physical body. This then divides what we are aware of and thinking of what we were aware of, or distinguishes the process of thinking from that of seeing during meditations.\" So then we have my commentary. This is one of my standard explanations on disuniting awareness as separate from consciousness. The first part of it\'s missing so the first sentence doesn\'t have exact continuity. Paramaguru Yogaswami had a terse way of stating this: “Sat Chit Ananda. That is one thing—Satchidananda. Sat is ‘you are.’ Chit is omnipresence—prakasha, light as from the sun, all-knowing. Ananda is bliss. They are three; but they are one. That is your nature.” In Hinduism, it is not enough to simply state that omnipresence resides at the core of our soul. This truth ultimately must be experienced by each of us. We can move toward experiencing omnipresence using a series of progressive practices. The first step is to understand and then identify ourselves as awareness rather than what we are aware of. A clear statement of this idea is found in the first four verses of \"Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras\": “Now, the exposition of yoga. Yoga is the restraint of mental activities. Then awareness abides in its essential nature. At other times, awareness takes on the form of the mental activities.” Awareness is the soul’s ability to sense, see or know and to be conscious of this knowing. In the Yoga Sutras, awareness is termed drashta, drik, chit and chitshakti. The state referred to in verse three—“Then awareness abides in its essential nature”—is the result of awareness disuniting with the mental activities and remaining temporarily aware only of itself until thoughts again arise. An example may be helpful. I hold up a piece of paper and I say, “I see the paper.” That makes sense, right? I see the paper in my hand. If I say, “I am the paper,” how many would agree? No one. We are trained from childhood that we are not physical objects. We perceive them. We see the paper. We smell the incense. We hear the water flowing. We are different from them. That’s the way we think. But then we say, “I am happy.” Think about it: we identify with the happiness we experience, but we are not the paper we see. Returning to Patanjali’s verses, happiness is the mental activity that awareness has taken the form of. The goal is to distinguish ourself from what is mental in the same way we distinguish ourself from what is physical. We don’t want to think: “I am happy.” We want to think: “I, awareness, am experiencing the emotion called happiness, but I am not happiness. I am the experiencer of happiness. That isn’t who I am. Just as I am not the paper I see.\" Wonderful lesson isn\'t it? Awareness, consciousness and mind. Have a wonderful day.