For whatever reason it has been important to me on my meditation journey to have a conceptual understanding of what it is I’m trying to do with meditation, even though meditation is ultimately a process of shedding conceptual layers. That may seem counterintuitive, but I’ve thought of it as like having a map that leads one to the brink of the great abyss. Maybe the right conceptual framing can help us move closer to the moment in which we finally drop those very concepts entirely. Perhaps I’m simply overly-conceptual. But perhaps I just need to know why it is, as I go to sit down on the cushion, that I’m sitting there at all. In order to get myself to the meditation cushion I have found that I need to ring the non-conceptual abyss with a conceptual scaffolding—a structure from which I might peer over the edge.

On that note, I had some sort of intellectual breakthrough yesterday with my understanding of what it is that the meditator is actually attempting to do in his/her shifting into pure awareness (or rigpa—the Tibetan term for ‘the ground of being’. Many terms could be used here. I will just use ‘pure awareness’). That is to say, I had a conceptual development of the process that ultimately leads to the elimination of concept itself. If you can embrace the paradox, perhaps this will be of assistance to your own personal meditation journeys.

The meditator ultimately is striving to cut out the conceptual framing of experience and to find union between subject and object—a union that this conceptual framing has been driven between like a wedge. Unio mystica, or mystical union, awaits its removal. I’d already known this for awhile, but yesterday I realized that there is no actual reason that I should feel my “self” to be located in my head other than for the coincidental arrangement of many of my sense organs all around it. There actually is no centralized place in space where the visual imagery or auditory stimuli all come together to be represented to the mind. I had always thought that these representations were being experienced by the mind over the shoulders, between the ears, and behind the eyes, and though this is true physically (i.e., these phenomena are in fact being processed there by the brain) it is actually not true experientially. That was just a deeply ingrained concept—the mind simply triangulates its own location by pinpointing the place over the shoulders, between the ears, and behind the eyes, but this experience of being situated there as a mind can collapse. Of course, as I’ve said, that is in fact where the brain sits, but as meditators we are interested in experiencing life as it is unfabricated (i.e. non-conceptually) as opposed to how our concepts tell us it is. And so, as a matter of experience sounds and sights are actually represented to the mind as occurring where the sensory objects themselves are located—that is to say, if one can dissolve the idea that their hearing of the world takes place in the head, they can find that instead they “hear” the world at all the various points in space where the world is making sound. The same goes for visual objects and all sensory phenomena. In that moment there is no longer a “listener”—there is only that which is heard, occurring where it actually occurs and not in the head. Awareness itself is externalized, and the barrier between body and environment breaks down. Sensations in the body lose their special status as “mine”. They come to feel no more or less attached to the observer than the engine drone of a passing airplane. In this unfabricated consciousness, phenomena exist autonomously as if free from a listener, a seer, a feeler—free from a meditator. This is the union of subject and object. When this occurs with all sensory phenomena, and when thoughts themselves are experienced in this manner as well, this is pure awareness as I currently understand it. When sustained, this is non-duality.