“The trusting and following my intuitive-awareness deep inside, is to experience and understand what needs to be known.”
A Talk Including Intuitive-Awareness by Ajahn Sumedho
If we think about meditation practice in terms of accomplishing something, we create an image that we then try to realise. What I recommend is to trust in the attentiveness of the mind, in mindfulness, and to let go of the desire to find or grasp anything. Consciousness is still there, and sensitivity — but it’s not experienced in terms of being a person. There’s just awareness of what is happening — of what the feeling is, or of the mood that one is experiencing in this moment. We can call this intuitive awareness. It’s not programmed and conditioned by thought or memory or perception.
However, as soon as we think about ourselves, how we are and what we are, we become a person. In fact, one of the big problems in meditation is of reinforcing a sense of self through taking ourselves too seriously. You know: we can see ourselves as religious people dedicated towards serious things, such as realising truth. We feel important; we are not just frivolous ordinary people who go shopping in the supermarket and watch television…. And of course this seriousness can have advantages; it might encourage us to give up foolish activities for more meaningful ones. But it can also lead to arrogance
and conceit: a sense of being someone who has special moral precepts or some altruistic goal, or even of having come onto the planet as some kind of messiah!
This conceit can make us take ourselves so seriously that we lose all perspective. It’s a problem in monastic life too: we could become incredibly serious about our moral purity, our discipline, our dedication and so on.
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f we think about meditation practice in terms of accomplishing something, we create an image that we then try to realise. What I recommend is to trust in the attentiveness of the mind, in mindfulness, and to let go of the desire to find or grasp anything. Consciousness is still there, and sensitivity — but it’s not experienced in terms of being a person. There’s just awareness of what is happening — of what the feeling is, or of the mood that one is experiencing in this moment. We can call this intuitive awareness. It’s not programmed and conditioned by thought or memory or perception.
However, as soon as we think about ourselves, how we are and what we are, we become a person. In fact, one of the big problems in meditation is of reinforcing a sense of self through taking ourselves too seriously. You know: we can see ourselves as religious people dedicated towards serious things, such as realising truth. We feel important; we are not just frivolous ordinary people who go shopping in the supermarket and watch television…. And of course this seriousness can have advantages; it might encourage us to give up foolish activities for more meaningful ones. But it can also lead to arrogance