Choiceless Awareness is the Dance
The kind of meditation most rewarding to me, the kind that has kept me coming back to it for some thirty years, is the least restrictive, most open kind: choiceless awareness.
But it’s not for everyone, so first the routine caveats. Significant mental health issues should be addressed with a licensed professional. And anyone experiencing adverse effects from meditation should not continue with it.
But if you have some meditation experience and find that a limited focus (such as the breath) is no longer engaging for you, try opening the range. Let your focus be . . . anything that arises. Anything you can experience: sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touch, any other feelings within the body, thoughts, moods, and emotions.
To include the sense of sight, of course, you need to open your eyes at least partially. But don’t really look; don’t examine closely for details. Rather, maintain a soft focus; let your vision just rest out on the floor in front of you.
The rest of the experiential field pretty much takes care of itself. Engaging in this type of meditation is an easy slide from one thing to the next. But as some teachers have noted, it’s not your mind that moves; rather, only the contents of experience.
So it might go something like this: the sound of traffic, then (without any resistance) a thought about how congested the roads are becoming, then (without any resistance) a thought about how much you think, then a feeling of tightness in the chest, then the look of the carpet out in front of you, a floater drifting through your field of vision, a comfortable feeling throughout your whole body . . . you get the point.
No labels need be applied. Rather, just awareness. That, and an attitude of noninterference.
I suppose we could describe this Vipassana practice as “observation of all experience with mindfulness and equanimity.” That’s accurate, but also a mouthful. In Zen it’s called shikantaza, or “just sitting”. That’s simpler, but also rather cryptic. Krishnamurti referred to it as choiceless awareness. That’s probably best. It sums it up perfectly.
When you start to do this meditation, subtleties of your experience will become evident, especially in regard to thoughts. You discover there is a difference between thinking, on the one hand, and observing thoughts, on the other. By thinking is meant the active manipulation of thought: pushing and pulling thoughts around, usually to attain or avoid something. This is effortful and, in a way, a kind of micro suffering.
But observing thoughts is entirely different. This is simply watching thoughts with awareness and acceptance, not trying to hold on. When the thoughts shift, as inevitably they do, they are allowed to pass away. Metaphors for this passing picture it as “clouds in the sky” or “driftwood on a stream”.
As you become more centered in this meditation, the arc of your thoughts, the time of their arising and passing away, tends to become briefer. Sometimes thoughts may die almost as soon as they arise. But they will never extinguish, at least not for long. And that’s fine.
When you find yourself lost in thought, not merely observing but pushing and pulling, what do you do? You don’t try to shift to something else. Rather, you just become aware of it, accept it. It will change.
The “choiceless” awareness described here helps to illuminate the difference between mindfulness and concentration. This is sometimes confusing, but actually it’s not complicated. Mindfulness is simply awareness. Concentration is limiting the field of awareness, keeping it steady it within a small range.
So, for example, focusing on the breath at the tip of your nose is a fairly concentrated awareness. Focusing on all bodily sensations is less so. Choiceless awareness is the least concentrated, the least limited, of all.
Of course the more concentrative techniques are helpful for training, which is why almost all of us begin with them. But they are also like doing stretches at the bar. Choiceless awareness is the dance.
