Chapter 1: What does it mean to be aware in meditation?
To be aware is to watch your bodily activity, the way you walk, the way you sit, the movements of your hands. It is to hear the words you use, to observe all your thoughts all your emotions, all your reactions. It includes awareness of the unconscious with its traditions, its instinctual knowledge, and the immense sorrow it has accumulated. Not only personal sorrow, but the sorrows of humanity.
You have to be aware of all that and you cannot be aware of it if you are merely judging, evaluating, saying, this is good and that is bad, this I will keep and that I will reject. All of which only makes the mind dull, insensitive, From awareness comes attention.
Attention flows from awareness when in that awareness there is no choice, no personal choosing, no experiencing, but merely observing. And to observe, you must have in the mind a great deal of space. A mind that is caught in ambition, greed, envy in the pursuit of pleasure and self-fulfillment with its inevitable sorrow, pain, despair, anguish.
Such a mind has no space in which to observe, to attend,
Chapter 2: How does attention arise from awareness?
It is crowded with its own desires, going round and round in its own backwaters of reaction. You cannot attend if your mind is not highly sensitive, sharp, reasonable, logical, sane, healthy, without the slightest shadow of neuroticism. The mind has to explore every corner of itself leaving no spot uncovered.
Because if there is a single dark corner of one's mind which one is afraid to explore, from that springs illusion. It is only in the state of attention that you can be a light unto yourself. And then every action of your daily life springs from that light.
Every action, whether you're doing your job, cooking, going for a walk, mending clothes or what you will.
This whole process is meditation. Meditation is one of the most extraordinary things. And if you do not know what it is, you're like the blind man in a world full of color, shadows, and moving light. It is not an intellectual affair. But when the heart enters into the mind, the mind has quite a different quality.
Chapter 3: What is the relationship between meditation and daily life?
It is really then limitless. Not only in its capacity to think, to act efficiently, but also in its sense of living in a vast space where you are part of everything. Meditation is the movement of love. It isn't the love of the one or of the many.
Chapter 4: How can one explore the depths of their mind through meditation?
It is like water that anyone can drink out of any jar, whether golden or earthenware. It is inexhaustible. And a peculiar thing takes place which no drug or self-hypnosis can bring about. It is as though the mind enters into itself. Beginning at the surface and penetrating ever more deeply until depth and height have lost their meaning and every form of measurement ceases.
In this state there is complete peace Not contentment which has come about through gratification, but a peace that has order, beauty and intensity. It can all be destroyed, as you can destroy a flower. And yet, because of its very vulnerability, it is indestructible.
Chapter 5: What is the nature of love in the context of meditation?
This meditation cannot be learned from another. You must begin without knowing anything about it and move from innocence to innocence. The soil in which the meditative mind can begin is the soil of everyday life. The strife, the pain and the fleeting joy. It must begin there and bring order
Chapter 6: How does one begin the journey of meditation without prior knowledge?
And from there, move endlessly. But if you are concerned only with making order, then that very order will bring about its own limitation. and the mind will be its prisoner. In all this movement, you must somehow begin from the other end, from the other shore, and not always be concerned with this shore, or how to cross the river. You must take a plunge into the water, not knowing how to swim.
And the beauty of meditation is that you never know where you are, where you are going, or what the end is.