The Interiority Of Felt Being, February, 16, 2010

In meditation, whether it is a formally eyes-closed kind of meditation or whether it is an open-eyed tuning into the present or into what is, beckons us into the interior of quiet Consciousness. It dissolves the I. Meditation dissolves this concrete sense of being a separate I. And how that happens is through attention, through something that happens in your field of attention.

Attention which is usually gripped around the body-mind and its outer functioning, meditation begins to deepen the mind in attention, deepen the mind and its comprehension, and where it resides. It deepens the sense of abiding in Being so that you begin to notice the Being. Attention begins to move away from the senses and starts to absorb itself in the feeling of Being, a feeling of Being.

So, in attention, in that field of attention, attention drops or fades or dissolves or merges back into a prior location. So, at some point, your attention gives itself up. It just dies, and in that dying of your attention something else comes to be, something which is beyond attention. So, attention dissolves and then there’s the revelation of what exists beyond the knowing mind. It’s just a revelation, not an attainment of something else, not something that’s going to fit into a bigger attention, but it’s the dissolution of attention itself into prior reality.

Attention will fade. It will just, even momentarily, it doesn’t have to fade gradually over minutes or hours. It can fade very quickly just the way a color will fade and then yield itself into whiteness. The color will have disappeared, that’s attention. If you were to bleach something you get all the color out and then there’s just white, just pure white. There’s no sign or trace of that blue anymore, and yet the blue is completely embedded in that whiteness. So, when white itself remains and there’s no trace of blue then blue is gone. Attention is gone. Even the mind is gone, and what is discovered is something about the nature of something indescribably unified that has no connection to anything that you can do.

It’s not about doing. This realization is not about doing it’s about just a kind of Beingness that is revealed. In that way, attention is the doorway. You don’t walk through it. Attention just slowly ebbs very deeply into itself. It just falls into itself. You can’t even say what happens. Just as you…. If you could interview a wave, an ocean wave, and say, “What happens when you’re on your way down when crashing back into the ocean?” It would have nothing to say to you. It would just say, “That’s the end of me.” It’s the glorious end of that Blissful rise out of that ocean and now it’s time to return. The mind and all of your individuality returns to a state of Universal Presence, Universal Consciousness, Being.