Awareness Explorers

Those who seek only to summit the mountain know nothing of its many faces

“Hi Shiv—I was unable to enroll in your one-year offering because of some life transitions that made it impossible to commit to meeting regularly. Just wondering—how’s it going? Is there some overall goal that you are expecting your members to reach by the end of the year?”

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We are well underway in the Dark Knight Journeys program. At each meeting participants engage in novel awareness-based exercises that I create in order to examine more closely how attention moves within the mind. Just seven weeks in, this process has been revelatory to say the least, not only for many of the participants but for me as well. It is fascinating to watch how each mind has a completely different makeup - and how attention anchors, and is destabilized, in entirely unique ways for each person.

How does awareness move when the body is at rest? In motion?

Does awareness natively anchor in the sensations of the physical body? In the phenomena of the outside world? In the visualizations of the imagining mind? In the awareness of awareness itself?

In what kinds of scenarios does awareness become more susceptible to suggestion? To influence? To unexamined beliefs - i.e. propaganda?

What kinds of internal cues or environmental prompts facilitate a spontaneous return to spaciousness - rather than through contrived effort?

One of the points I often emphasize and continually reiterate during these exercises is that “there is no right way to do this.” While each exercise has a specific format and objective - achieving that objective is not the goal. The real goal is to observe what happens as one tries to satisfy the objective.

In other words, success and failure at the task are one and the same to me. Because the real success lies in the fact that through undertaking the process - some new information that one was not aware of before is revealed. Some new understanding of how awareness moves within this unique body, mind and nervous system is unveiled. My own task as facilitator is to ensure that at the end of each session, every participant has learned at least one new thing about their own minds that they didn’t know before.

I am especially not interested in ‘improvement’. Even if the task were repeated 10 times and, with each iteration, the objective was not achieved - that, to me, would still be a resounding success. Why? Because each failure is entirely unique. What causes attention to derail in each case teaches the participant something new about how patterns of focus and distraction work in their own minds.

While awareness is universal - how attention moves through each individual mind is highly unique.

We are awareness. Yet we move to the shape of the mind - just like a river flows to the shape of a mountain. There is no right or wrong way to flow. But we can become curious about the terrain.

We are not trying to get to the top of the mountain. We are trying to explore the mountain. And sometimes exploring that mountain begins with some arbitrary objective such as, “find a path to the top of that mountain.”

Yet, in moving towards that objective - all sorts of facets of the mountain become unveiled as you experiment with various paths through trial and error. Unique caves and fissures along its faces. Hidden sources of fresh water you never dreamed existed. Various forms of life that were previously unknown to you. Sudden drops and chasms that were never visible from the superficial vantage point you were always accustomed to.

Yet there is one revelation in particular that is especially shocking.