Loch Kelly

Week One, Open-Hearted Awareness: A Cure for Our Addictive Thinking

September 7, 2015
The Five States of Awareness
2015 Tricycle Magazine

Welcome, everyone.

My name is Loch Kelly, and this is a four-week retreat for Tricycle Magazine. Im so
glad youre able to join us here, and Im looking forward to sharing some wonderful
practices that you may not have been able to experience before.

So let me begin by just giving you a little context, a sense of the view of where Im
coming from and how were going to proceed in this retreat. Im really taking this retreat
as an opportunity to have you practice while you are listening to me. So even though its
a short amount of time, Im going to share practices that fit the format of this video. So in
order to do that, rather than leading long sittings or having you stop and close your eyes,
Im going to share some practices from the Sutra Mahamudra tradition.

The Sutra Mahamudra is a tradition that actually connects many of the traditions from
Buddhism. It starts with a sutra, which is from the Theravada tradition, and then it moves
to being a Mahayana tradition, similar to Zen or other Mahayana traditions. And then the
Sutra Mahamudra was also picked up by Tibetan Buddhism. When it was an Indian
tradition, Sutra Mahamudra was renowned for having lay people awaken in the midst of
their daily life. And this is what drew me to this.

My feeling is that people can awaken and that meditation is often the first step to what
Buddhism is truly about, which is the possibility of awakening from a separate sense of
self that causes suffering in our daily lives. So no matter how much we have grown in
terms of our functioning in the worldI dont know if youve noticedbut theres a
sense that theres still a perpetual dissatisfaction. Some kind of gnawing, some kind of
continual sense that theres another problem to be solved. This is the kind of suffering at
the root of this separate sense of self that were going to address in a number of ways.

Loch Kelly
Week One, Open-Hearted Awareness: A Cure for Our Addictive Thinking
September 7, 2015
The Five States of Awareness
2015 Tricycle Magazine

So lets begin just by taking a deep breath. As you breathe in, just allow yourself to settle
in. Instead of looking this way at the screen and at me, begin to turn your awareness
back. Begin to allow yourself to rest as your own awareness here and now. As you take a
breath, be aware of the sensations within your body, but then also notice the awareness
thats here as well. No matter how your body feels, whether its comfortable or
uncomfortable, in pain or in a sense of ease, if there are a lot of emotions going on or
youre tired, notice even now that you can allow your body to be just as it is. Without
changing it at all.

As you do, also notice that theres an awareness here as well. The awareness is not tired.
The awareness is not in pain. The awareness is with your body, within your body, as your
body, all around your body. Feel that awareness within. Accept just how you are. Things
just as they are, here and now.

And the same with your mind. Notice monkey mind, chattering mind, thoughts, feelings,
sensations, moving through your head. Instead of trying to change them, instead of
calming your mind, instead of trying to have positive thoughts, see what its like just to
accept your mind just as it is. Distracted, uncomfortable, calm, at ease, worried,
frightened, or whatever way it is. Just letting everything be as it is.

As you accept things as they are, notice theres also an awareness thats here to which
these thoughts, sensations, feelings and fears appear. Let yourself rest back and abide as
that awareness, which is pain-free, thought-free, worry-free, fearless and accepting
naturally, without even trying to accept.

Feel this sense of inclusion that the awareness is not just outside and observing from
above, but is inherent within your body and mind. Feel this sense of unity, of awareness,
and the appearance of thoughts. Allowing your body and your mind to be as they are.

Loch Kelly
Week One, Open-Hearted Awareness: A Cure for Our Addictive Thinking
September 7, 2015
The Five States of Awareness
2015 Tricycle Magazine

Take a deep breath. Allow a smile to come to your face, and just be with what is. No big
deal.

This Sutra Mahamudra approach begins with a kind of deliberate mindfulness: an

awareness of our breath, an awareness of our thoughts. But then what were going to do
is continue to discover an effortless mindfulness and a heart-mindfulness.

Let me begin by giving you a sense of how we might calm or find the calm, rather than
trying to calm our mind. Theres a book by B. Allan Wallace called The Attention
Revolution, where he gives the ten stages of meditation in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.
But he says in the introduction, At the eighth stage we discover awareness of awareness.
And many people can begin here and continue onward. And this is the kind of approach
we hope to offer here today: to allow you to see whether we can begin with a kind of
effortless mindfulness, which is a way of discovering an awareness thats already calm.

Let me begin with a quote by Mingyur Rinpoche, who is the teacher who asked me to
teach Sutra Mahamudra. He says, We access the mind of calm abiding through
recognition. What do we recognize? Awareness. The ever-present knowing quality of
mind from which were never separate, even for an instant. Even though normally we do
not recognize awareness, we can no more live without it than we can live without
breathing. Discovering our own awareness allows us to access the natural steadiness and
clarity of mind.

Here were going to begin with a few glimpse practices to discover the awareness thats
already calm. Rather than beginning with deliberate mindfulness, where we use
awareness to calm our mind, our chattering monkey mind, lets see what its like if we
can discover an awareness thats already here. Mingyur Rinpoche also said, The

Loch Kelly
Week One, Open-Hearted Awareness: A Cure for Our Addictive Thinking
September 7, 2015
The Five States of Awareness
2015 Tricycle Magazine

essence of meditation is awareness. Awareness is our subject. What awareness are we
talking about?

Lets look at five types of awareness. We know a few of them, but the other is what we
will be exploring together during these four weeks, and experiencing directly.

The first type of awareness we all know is called attention. From this awareness of
attention, were looking up to thought, were looking from thought, were aware of what
were looking at right now. Youre aware of the screen. Youre aware of hearing my
voice. Youre aware of what youre thinking. So attention is a normal way of functioning
in the world, that type of awareness. In fact, the first type of meditation we often do, onepointed meditation, uses attention. We bring our attention to our breath, we bring our
attention to a candle. We bring our attention to a chant; we bring our attention to one
point. By doing so, interestingly, we are stealing the moving monkey mind by using a
tool of this mind attention.

The second type of awareness is meditative awareness or mindful awareness. This type of
awareness is a way of separating our awareness from identifying with our thinking thus
creating a meditator who is observing thoughts, feelings, and sensations that are moving.
This type of awareness, this mindful awareness of thoughts, feelings, and sensations, is
often called the four foundations of mindfulness. It is a way to see who we are not. When
were identified with thinking, we take ourselves to be thinking. I think, therefore I am.
But you are not your thoughts only. Your thoughts come and go. As your thoughts come
and go, this mindful awareness has separated out until its able to observe in a detached
manner nonjudgmentally arising and passing of thoughts. To see that the thought, I am
my thoughts, is just a thought. So this is an important stage of deliberate mindfulness.

Loch Kelly
Week One, Open-Hearted Awareness: A Cure for Our Addictive Thinking
September 7, 2015
The Five States of Awareness
2015 Tricycle Magazine

The third type of awareness were going to explore now gets us into effortless
mindfulness. The third kind of awareness that were going to experience directly is
spacious awareness or pure awareness. This awareness is not located in a meditative
point-of-view, but actually is infinite, contentless, boundless, timeless, and aware like a
big sky mind, or initially like a choiceless awareness. Like an awareness without an
object, aware of itself because it is awareness itself. This spacious, boundless, infinite
awareness is a way that can be discovered through turning awareness around and looking
through the meditator, opening up this field thats both all around and within us, or
simply by unhooking and dropping to the subtlest level of awareness thats free of
thought, sensation, or opening to the boundless quality of awareness, and then looking
back from this awareness to notice the contents of mind and the experiences coming to us
from the world. From this spacious awareness, well notice that were able to focus
effortlessly without distraction. We will do a couple of practices to experience this.

The fourth type of awareness is when the spacious awareness realizes that it is none other
than form. Form is emptiness; emptiness is none other than form. When this awareness,
which is transcendent, realizes its imminent, when this subtlest, formless, empty
awakeness realizes that appearance is its ornament, is none other than the dance of
emptiness, then there is an inclusion of the ultimate reality, unconditioned and
conditioned, inherent within. This feeling of embodied awareness could be the fourth, or
a kind of presence, or a just this. In Zen, they call it ordinary mind. In Tibetan Buddhism,
we move from recognition to realization that this is who we are, to abiding. The abiding
is the inclusion, the co-emergent wisdom, of having us realize that nothing is excluded,
that everythings included.

The fifth type of awareness that well explore is openhearted awareness. Openhearted
awareness is sometimes called bodhicitta, or awake consciousness. Interestingly, the
word bodhi means awake and citta means consciousness, but the translation is

Loch Kelly
Week One, Open-Hearted Awareness: A Cure for Our Addictive Thinking
September 7, 2015
The Five States of Awareness
2015 Tricycle Magazine

compassionate expression. Thats interesting, yeah? This is a movement from thoughtbased knowing to awareness-based knowing to heart-mind. This dropping, unhooking, or
opening, and reconnecting from nonconceptual awareness is what frees us from the
addition to thinking, from the sense of a separate sense of self. So were both free in
waking up from our separate sense of self and then waking into our body and awakening
out from this openhearted awareness into creativity and relationship, and this is where
compassionate expression comes from. This is the true freedom of living this fortunate
human life.

Lets explore a little bit about whats in the way, whats keeping us in this suffering, and
experience, in the Sutra Mahamudra way, some glimpses and tastes of freedom that are
here. The view of this approach is almost like a scientific approach. What Ill do is I give
you the hypothesis or the premise, then a set of experiments, and then you report the
results. You taste and see. You see whats true, rather than starting with belief. This is
kind of a democratic approach, so that we can all awaken in the midst of our daily life.

Having taught deliberate mindfulness at New York Insight Meditation and many other
places for 25 years, working with many beginners, and then for the last ten years,
teaching this direct approach with gradual unfolding, Ive found that beginners find it just
as easy to start with this approach because its new. Theres new ways of adjusting or
discovering or uncovering or letting go or learning a new way of observing.

Lets try this approach of direct recognition and gradual unfolding. The practice is often
described as small glimpses many times. Well have a glimpse of this true nature, this
sense of Buddha nature, this sense of awake awareness, this sense of openhearted
awareness, source of mind, and then let it abide by itself. The premise or hypothesis is
each one of us is already this true nature: that you are already the awakeness you are
seeking, that who you are is the love and the natural qualities of compassion are already

Loch Kelly
Week One, Open-Hearted Awareness: A Cure for Our Addictive Thinking
September 7, 2015
The Five States of Awareness
2015 Tricycle Magazine

available to you as you. The way to experience it is just to uncover or discover, let go,
surrender, and then not just remain in the gap of not knowing, but discover the new
knowing that already knows, the not-knowing that knows: nonconceptual awareness.

So enjoy. Ill see you next week.