Day 9 - Awareness is like the sky
The old yogis and monks compared our faculty of awareness to the wide open sky.
The Buddha instructs us to: “Develop a mind that is vast like space, where experiences both pleasant and unpleasant can appear and disappear without conflict, struggle or harm. Rest in a mind like vast sky.”
Much more recently, Ram Dass puts it this way: “Let me explore with you another way of defining who you are. Look at the cloud again, and become aware of the sky that surrounds the cloud. I invite you to identify your awareness with the sky. In your awareness there is your life that is cloud. In other words, your whole concept of who you think you are, all your sense experiences of your body, all of the stuff of ‘me,’ is all the cloud. And the cloud is being appreciated or embraced or carried by the sky. The sky is just awareness. It’s much easier to describe the cloud than to describe the sky. It doesn’t have a beginning or an end, and it really doesn’t have qualities, it’s just sky. That’s the quality of awareness. It doesn’t have a trip. The sky doesn’t have a trip, it’s just hanging out.”
PRACTICE: Look at the sky
As you go about your day, take a few moments to pull your focus out of your head (thoughts and emotions), out of what's right in front of you, and look up into the sky. Notice (and savour!) the lack of stories and content up there. See if that change of perspective helps you get in touch with your own pure awareness.
