Awareness Practice introduces us to the forms of practice, to the mechanics of:
Meditation
Reflective listening
Process mapping
Keeping commitments
Two-handed recording
Writing letters of appreciation
Interviewing
Peace quotes
Practice reminders
Koans.
However, the magic of Practice, the blessed knowledge of Emptiness, is encountered by perfecting the form through consistent practice.
What do these forms all have in common?
They facilitate movement to a context of Conscious Compassionate Awareness.
From There Is Nothing Wrong with You:
In theistic terms (Screwtape’s realm), this movement of attention to Conscious Compassionate Awareness is seeking God’s Presence and, for Screwtape, must be discouraged at all costs.
Screwtape: The only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the person from the Enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the person away from the Light and out into the Nothing.
“I don’t want to, I don’t feel like it” is the garden variety resistance deployed by The Tempter’s office to keep a practitioner from Presence. Before we dismiss “I don’t want to, I don’t feel like it” as just ego, let’s look at what it really is. It is:
Indifference
Disinterest
Avoidance
Rejection
Negation
…often directed toward someone’s (your) suffering. Resistance is an absence of compassion, the readiness to be subjected to the voices of egocentric karmic conditioning/self-hate. Transcending resistance is cultivating the willingness to take responsibility for the one life each of us has to save. From What You Practice Is What You Have:
The two-handed recording is Compassion in action and is our best tool in this endeavor.
Compassion recognizes someone’s suffering.
Compassion picks up the recorder.
Compassion listens.
Compassion responds.
Compassion is recognized
Compassion is received.
The “ego-you” is dissolved.
No wonder there is resistance to this practice tool.
However, if we become practiced in going beyond resistance and fully adopt a practice, Screwtape changes tactics. To edge the spiritually devoted away from the Light, the Tempter now attempts to ensure that seeking Presence doesn’t ripen into finding Presence.
For example, the practitioner is:
- allowed to get to the cushion but is distracted from staying with pure Awareness by a compelling thought.
- allowed to receive Practice Reminders but not follow the instructions contained in them.
- allowed to pick up the recorder but not allowed to unlock the Mentor within.
- allowed to listen to Open Air but not allowed to put themselves in the queue.
- allowed to keep a commitment but then made to feel bad about not being wholehearted about keeping it 100% of the time.
- allowed to write a letter of appreciation but not receive the goodness that they are.
Practicing form without making the full movement to Conscious Compassionate Awareness results in, in Screwtape’s words: …a vague, though uneasy, feeling that the practitioner hasn't been doing very well lately. This feeling has to be handled carefully.
Screwtape: If such a feeling is allowed to live, but not allowed to become irresistible and flower into real repentance, it has one invaluable tendency. It increases the patient's reluctance to think about the Enemy. All humans at nearly all times have some such reluctance; but when thinking of Him involves facing and intensifying a whole vague cloud of half-conscious guilt, this reluctance is increased tenfold. They hate every idea that suggests Him, just as men in financial embarrassment hate the very sight of a pass-book.
Facing the dragon of unease as soon as there is a glimmer of awareness that it is lurking is a practice encouragement to be taken seriously! Each time we find the courage to look directly at unease we see it for the chimera it is. As unease dissipates, awareness of the shimmering perfection of the moment emerges. Faith expands and devotion deepens.
If reluctance to seek Presence is allowed to build, whatever the messaging…
I’m doing it wrong
I can’t do this
It’s not working
I’m not getting anywhere
I don’t want to sit every day for 30 minutes!
I can listen to the recording, I don’t have time to participate live on the show
…resistance (I don’t want to I don’t feel like it) will eventually prevail. The more often a practitioner is talked out of any form of practice, the more difficult it is to be motivated to seek Presence. As Screwtape points out, less and less effort will be required to seduce the practitioner away from Practice/practicing.
Screwtape: You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday's paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, “I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.”
With the force of resistance, it appears that Screwtape has hit upon a winning strategy to thwart a seeker of Presence. But if we examine the how of resistance, we see resistance is simply a negation of What Is. What Is, has to be in order for it to be negated. Even within resistance, Presence is. Regardless of our awareness of it, or lack of awareness of It, It Is.
Getting past resistance is seeing through the illusion of “what is not.” It is realizing the “I” that doesn’t want to and doesn’t feel like it is “not me.” This way of seeing is called acceptance. As the Guide writes in When You’re Falling Dive:
The movement from resistance to acceptance isn’t a leap. It’s a small step!
All we have to “do” is to accept that we resist. Then we are not in resistance, we’re in acceptance. The price of freedom from suffering is cultivating the willingness to make that movement from resistance to awareness of resistance.
The choice is ours. What will we choose?
We get to find out.
We are awareness practitioners after all!
Gasshō
ashwini