Right Under Our Nose

So many words for just one thing: Ground, base, intrinsic awareness, buddha-nature, mind essence, awakened mind, ordinary mind - they go on and on. The problem with all this (for me) is that when I first heard them I instantly thought of them as being about something other than myself. They all in a mysterious way were pointing at something outside and beyond my experience. A bit like the word ‘God’. And by extension I would have to do lots and lots of meditation to get an experience of them - or it. And I mean really lots. However, what it has taken a shockingly long time to realise is that what is being described is (and was) something that was already present but something I was not yet aware of. All these rather grand and mystifying terms were simply pointing to the awareness that already existed and which, when caught up in all my thoughts and emotions, was entirely obscured. I should have been quicker on this because this is what was always being said. Awareness is pristinely pure and spontaneously present. It’s pure in the sense that it’s always been pure in the way a mirror may not be marked by its reflections, and it’s present without being - unlike dualistically configured consciousness - dependent upon a previous cause. It simply is. It’s what is aware of these words as you read them.

While meditation is necessary there is a difference between a kind of slogging it out practice, an extended endurance event, and something far lighter which sets the scene for suddenly catching something previously hidden but blindingly obvious once seen. Stephan Bodian gives instructions for this that I particularly like for their simplicity - here they are in a slightly modified form:

• With eyes closed begin by allowing your body to settle and rest awareness on the coming and going of the breath for a few minutes. (Don’t rush this.)

• Now let go of the breath and allow awareness to expand and include the full range of experiences arising within and outside of your body. Allow thoughts, emotions, physical sensations, pleasure and pain to be just as it is. No changing anything. (Again, don’t rush it. Relax.)

• Notice how you can be aware of these experiences but not caught up in them. We are not our thoughts, emotions or bodily sensations, we are the one who is aware of them - though as yet, we may not know who that one is. Stepping back, just rest and allow all these contents of awareness to be present. No effort.

• Now become aware of this awareness. Notice the awake, aware space, the boundary-less, non-locatable openness, that’s prior to experience and allows experience to happen within it. It is not an object of experience itself because it is the space in which all experiences come and go. An awareness that seems to be looking through your eyes and experiencing through the senses.

• Rest in this spacious awareness - you are this pure and limitless awareness, the ground of and within which all experience arises. You can’t experience it (as something other than yourself) but it does recognise itself.

• Now open your eyes and gaze around the room or space where you are sitting from within this new perspective of being awareness rather than a separate self. What do you see? Are the objects of your senses solid and separate, or are they made of the same awareness that is gazing out through the eyes? Do they have any separate substantiality apart from the awareness with which they are perceived. What do you discover?

• Gaze with sheer awareness into sheer awareness, and let go of the usual way in which you organise experience into 'me' at the centre of everything else. There is actually no one perceiving, nothing other perceived, no inside and outside. Subject and object are not two. Just simple awake awareness in which everything comes and goes. This is not a mystical state, it’s simply what's already happening.

• And rest without interference - not trying to improve anything because the moment we do awareness enters again instantly into the misperception of dualism.

What I particularly like about this ‘doing nothing’ meditation is the way it leads us into resting in an awareness in which everything, including the meditator, is gradually revealed to be nothing other than awareness itself. It also names in its penultimate instruction the misperception of reality that is the cause of all unhappiness and discontent. This is the really important bit that took me ages to really understand. We are not trying to discover some sort of new and better ‘non-dual awareness’, but rather rest in the awareness that exists before falling into the misperception of reality as something that is ‘out there’ and other than we are. It’s actually possible to see this misperception happening in real time once we know about it – it happens in two steps. The first is we become drawn into our thoughts and are then carried away by them. In ordinary mindfulness this is understood as becoming distracted. And then the second step is we more or less immediately automatically organise this distracted state of mind as having me in the centre surrounded by everything else - that is what is meant by ‘dualistic’. Subject and object. However, if we stick with the sensory evidence it’s as Stephan says – sheer awareness simply aware of sheer awareness. A field of changing experiences coming and going, awareness and the content of awareness not two. Not a new special awareness but the awareness that has always been present. A simple, unencumbered awareness that is not hidden by our identification with all the stuff we are caught up in. An awareness that exists before everything else happens. An awareness it is utterly impossible to find anything outside of or other than. An awareness that we appropriately describe as the ‘Ground’. It’s just what has always been there.

NW. 23 September 2026

With particular thanks to Stephan Bodian. His instructions for this practice may be found within: Infinite Awakening, A Guide to Non-dual Wisdom and the Pathless Path page 23, Meditation Who Am I?