An intimacy with your mind
Ram Dass would call his honed conscious state loving awareness, which always struck me as the most colorful way to describe our ordinary illuminated state of being experience.
But one day recently in the middle of practice, I decided to take it as an instruction, as in, “try loving awareness on each in breath,” or “orient your mind so that it is loving awareness in the present moment.”
Try it. Try loving consciousness. Make a friend of your mind. It is after all your constant companion throughout your life, the only thing you can be certain of.
I was transfixed for a time with this new attitude in my practice. The people close to me get a great deal of my love and I tell them every time they are near me or any time we talk—I love you. I practice loving-kindness or metta meditation and try to imagine compassion in relation to suffering and sympathetic joy in relation to happiness for experiences in my life, in the lives of my family, friends, and even in the lives of strangers. I have loved experiences, cognitive pursuits, music, books, foods, and even my meditation practice itself, so the most sensical thing is to turn love on the space where love is an articulation of the boundless loving awareness… and begin loving consciousness!
But this of course is not quite right—there is not the lover (me) and the beloved (awareness), there is just loving awareness.
Take on the aspect of love. Try to embody it in your practice. Really hone in on the feeling of what it means to love the present moment, life’s sole contact with existence—what is. You are loving awareness, a formless entity of love. Sharing an intimacy with reality beyond what is just on offer in the purely physical sense. Being loving awareness.
Glow as loving awareness in your daily life—making space for the suffering and joy of others—and appreciating life and loving consciousness in all of its illuminated splendor.
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