Lojong Practice Journal: Examine the nature of unborn awareness
The 59 slogans through a social justice lens
‘Examine the nature of unborn awareness’ is a particularly Buddhist-centred slogan. It is a teaching on emptiness, and emptiness is, in my experience, something unique to Buddhism as a religion — although emptiness is not generally a unique concept, as any physicist will happily tell you, albeit with differences in language.
On an intellectual level, emptiness is not difficult to grasp. The greatest teaching I have ever heard of it comes from Thich Nhat Hanh, who says that when we hear that the nature of everything is emptiness, we must ask the question: Empty of what?
The answer: Empty of inherent existence.
If we were to grind down the entire universe into the smallest particles we know of, we would not find a ‘chair’ particle or ‘North America’ particle or ‘Kaitlyn Hatch’ particle. It is not, as is often the misinterpretation, that things don’t exist, but that things (and people and concepts and social systems etc.) exist in relation to everything else. Another way to put it is that everything is dynamic, nothing is static.
But this slogan wants us to go beyond the intellectual understanding of emptiness to a lived experience of it. What better way to challenge the idea that we are “real” in a solid, existent way than to examine and analyse our own cognition, awareness and consciousness.
The instruction of this slogan is to examine the nature of the mind, to determine what it is and where it can be found. As with any emptiness instruction, it is one of asking questions. We can ask, for example, what ‘unborn’ means in the context of this slogan. Or why ‘unborn’ is used as a qualifier for ‘awareness’.
As we ask such questions, we will start to see that answers are elusive, and our concepts of mind (and how that relates to a solid sense of ‘me’ or ‘I’) are just that: concepts. They are not solid, tangible, or graspable.
This practice can be quite scary as it means we genuinely see the impermanence of all things, ourselves included. But it can also be quite liberating. As we examine the nature of unborn awareness, we can start to see how trying to solidify or hold onto something that can’t be found causes a lot of suffering. We care a great deal about ‘my’ awareness’, but if awareness isn’t a tangible thing, then there is not anything for us to be fretting over. Not that we should put ourselves at risk by doing anything foolish. Remember, it’s not that we don’t exist, but that our existence is in relation to everything around us. But we can relax and be a bit less uptight about protecting something that isn’t even there. This is a practice of letting go and opening up, expanding or dismantling a fixed view of a small self, to reside in the bigger space of mind, which cannot be possessed or found by any single being.
Originally published on Medium.
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