One hour guided meditation by Michael Taft on contacting vast, spacious awareness. Ends at 1:00:54
Then dharma talk and Q&A.
This is a variation on the age-old technique created by Dogen (1200–1253 c.e.) called eko hensho in Japanese. This means “turn the light around” or in other words to look at awareness using awareness.
When attempting to talk about awareness of awareness, things start to sound arcane, gobbledy-goopy, or willfully obscurantist. Sorry to sound that way, but I really am describing it as clearly as possible.
photo by Michael Taft
Michael
Experientially when awareness was expanded I was able to put to the side any contact and focus on awareness itself. It felt to me more like the potential for awareness. Interestingly the one thing I did have some difficulty putting to the side was a little image of a meditator (me) floating around in a vast space. The image would creep towards the side but never really make it there. Awareness was not projected from this image but going towards it. Also when I shifted awareness to sensory contact itself the potential of awareness as imagined from the vast perspective was actually manifested. This still did not feel like it was generated by a decider of what will be known (me). It’s mysterious to me in every moment what will be known and surely dependent on this particular organisms conditioning. The best I can do is apply the four efforts of abandon,guard against, cultivate, and establish when reacting skillfully vs unskillfully to this mysterious process!