Andrew's
Awareness Diary

July 12th, 2008

‘IT’

The presencing of the Sun is ITS shining
The presencing of the blue sky is ITS bluing
The bodying of the body is ITS bodying
  
Yet this IT is not the Sun and not the sky
IT is not blue and it is no-body
 
For that which presences is not its presencing
Its presencing is ITS presencing, that of
Awareness beyond identity

Peter Wilberg


Thought I’d keep you up to date with my experiencing. I’ve wanted to find a way to be aware all the time and this involved ‘remembering’ - that is, not forgetting to be aware as you wrote. I’ve also wanted to tie together all the reflections on Samuel Avery stuff that were triggered in me. And I’ve wanted to connect together these two streams with something you mentioned - to give my sensory awareness as much to to ‘objects’ as I was doing to my body. It all seemed to ‘come to a head’ after reading your little ‘IT’. I was looking at a chair in my room, gazing at it, and it came to me that it was a verb, not a noun. That is, even in its complete non-action, just seemingly sitting there, present, immobile, THAT was ‘action’, ‘activity’, movement, and that it was the activity or ‘doing’ of Awareness. I think before I was always conceiving (without knowing I was) of ‘ing’ as, say, the movement of a tree’s branches (what the tree was doing). I think that I was conceiving of ‘oranging’, chairing, bricking, etc (I’m talking of ‘objects’ here) as something that these things did, while believing that I wasn’t, if you catch my drift. For when I was gazing at the chair, I could feel and knew that the chair itself, whatever it was, was in its essence, awareness chairing. I suppose what I am saying is that I have rid myself of the concept of ‘movement’ — things don’t have to be ‘moving’ in order to be a verb or a process! Not such a surprise when you consider that I have been intending to meditate while not moving! In fact, you could say, poetic justice! From that insight I quickly moved to there being no things at all as things simply present, waiting to be perceived! The sun is shining. No, Awareness is shining! It manifests as ‘the sun’ and shines through that manifestation. There actually is no sun itself which is shining. In the same way as in meditation, when I have a thought that I take as ‘mine’ (Anavamala) I not only step back from it, and identify with Awareness, thus confirming that the local Identity, Andrew Gara, is just that - a local identifying of this thought as belonging to the manifestation – but also step back and see that both the thought AND the local
manifestation are the manifesting or presencing of ‘It’ - Awareness.

There is no sun simply present. There is only Awareness presencing as ‘The Shining’ of the sun, the bluing of the sky, the bodying of the body. I then felt something extremely difficult to put into words but it involves a thought from Samuel Avery. It went like this. If, in my simple fleshyness, still and unmoving, I am a verb, a presencing of Awareness, that could be likened to a state of ‘constant velocity’. And thus any action which ‘I’ perform, say, have an idea, or decide to walk to the kitchen, could be likened to ‘acceleration’, a change in velocity, velocity ‘velociting’. And in gazing at the chair I felt it like a ‘sounding’ of Awareness. Just as sounds emerge from silence, and only ‘exist’ while the strings are being plucked or the keys pressed, so do ‘sights’ like a chair, emerge from the silence of Awareness, and ‘exist’ only as long as Awareness keeps playing the ‘chair’. I write every day. A baker bakes loaves of bread every day of the week. How many times has Beethoven’s 5th been played since he wrote it? How can people go along and here it for the 50th time? How can an orchestra perform it more than once? We constantly do the ‘same’ things over and over again. How else could we
do this and get fulfilment from it, were these repeated things, not constantly new and emerging fresh from Awareness? I could feel around me the utter newness of each moment, of each thing.

Finally on my walk this morning, as I meditated on your particular way of seeing the Atman in the eyes of your mirror reflection, I began to feel the Awareness self in a certain ‘mudra’. Totally in Awareness I could feel the cast of my face, how it felt in my eyes and cheeks, as if there was a certain smile on my face. This all went with a certain ‘idea shape’ — a feeling of ‘my outer gaze turned inwards as my inner gaze turned outwards’. I can best summarise this whole experience by referring to what it feels like when I am in an accelerated state of consciousness (to use Jane Robert’s terminology) usually while reading. A certain relaxed alertness, a taking in of the words, while feeling them out inwardly, a waiting, a an awareness attuned to the slightest bodily feelings and an awareness attuned to the words. That was how I felt on my walk. As if I was ‘intending’ to read the environment I was in like reading a page and waiting for felt
sense to come to me. I was giving my awareness to the environment around me as I give my awareness to text I read, allowing it to shape me or me to shape myself to it. There were times on my walk when the environment was ultra alive, sparkling, luminescent, like on acid. I can take on that ‘mudra’ anytime I want. I can evoke that feeling in
my face and quickly body it completely. I can feel the act of identification shift from Andrew Gara, to It Andrew Gara-ing.