We are pure awareness; and the layers of identification and conceptualizations that we have about everything including ourself is fabrication. This photo of a mosaic in a mosque is beautiful but it can never display the absolute beauty of Reality as it is. Our mind is like the mosaic, and its processes are like the tiles. We organize thoughts, beliefs, and perceptions into patterns whereby the world around us is recognizable. But, and here’s the kicker, nothing is only as it seems to our set of patterned thoughts, beliefs, or the concepts underlying perceptions.
Therefore, to perceive – not through established concepts, identification with sensations, or through the sense of self – is to to experience pure perception. Pure perception is not hard to experience or to bring forward because we are Awareness. Awareness is what we are, why we are, and shares in the pure fullness of all that can be perceived.
The proof of the statement regarding fabrication is in one’s likes and dislikes. Proof is in one’s demeanor of optimism or pessimism, critical or allowing, patient or impatient. These states of emotion-mind are based upon one’s patterns of thought which create an overall personal consciousness. It rules the roost until the patterns are recognized as just that: a collection of thoughts, beliefs, ideas, and habituated responses that have stabilized into how one thinks, how one views people, places, things, circumstances, as well as oneself.
A profound power lies in exploring this. The power lies in the options that one has as a human being to create new pathways of thought, new concepts, to engage new ideas, and/or to transform patterns of consciousness that have become so common-place as to have become unconscious. Unconscious is unconscious. One of the stated goals of a meditation practice is conscious awareness. As such, the patterns in one’s consciousness are an excellent place to start.
This Intermediate meditation gives instructions on how to establish and stabilize pure perception. The instructions are simple. The effort required is the challenge.
Downloadable podcast: Intermediate: Undoing the paterns of consciousness