Meditation Review

Settling with the Hero’s Journey
Take your meditation posture, sitting upright. Allow the eyes to close. Reflect on the heroic journey of your life in this moment, noticing the challenges and the places where there is grab. Recognize the sense of self that is caught there. See it clearly — the patterns, the behavior, the familiar way of getting stuck.

Searching the Self
Bring that sense of self into your practice. Now search through the field of experience: sensations, sounds, thoughts, and images. Moment by moment, look for the solid self. As you search, the self becomes unfindable, unlocatable. When this recognition dawns, affirm awareness that is still, open, non-reactive, and lucidly clear.To protect against the subtle dullness that can arise from merely resting in the ocean and waves, we now bring an intention of immediacy — to see into each moment as being open.

Look carefully with the intention to seal each moment as open — to truly know that every instant is open of any inherent existence, merely a construction of mind.

Sealing is an act of authority, imprinting each mind moment with the knowledge of openness.

Immediacy
Operating out of the warm, spacious ocean of lucid-awareness, bring greater intention into seeing each arising with clear awareness. Moment by moment, let the clarity of loving awareness immediately know whatever is arising — sensations, feelings, visual perception, energy, sound. Moment by moment. Immediately recognizing what is arising.

Notice: whatever arises is immediately known. Awareness knows each instant with precision as whatever arises arises as an expression of this clear knowing — luminous awareness, open and clearly known.

Now, in every moment, emphasize recognition: what arises is open. With the fire of immediacy, search each instant, and recognize its ineffability, its openness. This is Sealing with Immediacy.

Look so closely at the subtle level of perception that you catch the energy of the instant immediately, recognizing it as open and clearly known. As you continue, events spontaneously reveal themselves as openness and liveliness. Each wave of arising is seen as openness itself, luminous and clearly known.

Practicing this way, every moment unfolds upon arising as open, every experience reveals itself as lively openness and love, luminous and clearly known.

If what arises feels dull or sluggish, notice: this is a lack of immediacy. Press in with greater awareness. See each instant with the lens of beauty and joy. Then the heart-mind naturally, automatically, recognizes phenomena as open and clearly known. The recognition becomes effortless.

Once we have the clear immediacy of the heartmind knowing each instant as open we can expand the sealing to include the whole range of background structures, the deeper activities of the mind and beliefs running in the background of experience. This is Sealing with Range.

Mistakes Arising as Wisdom

Now, looking more carefully to see those aspects of your experience that you don’t obviously seal as open. These are the minimized windows in your psyche that are still operating and yet not apparent on your desktop.

(Corrects for under-application of openness — progressing from gross to subtle)

Gross Obscurations — Sensory and Energetic Dullness

Dullness — open.
Heaviness or sluggish perception — open.
Not knowing what you’re doing right now — open.
All difficulties in meditation — open.
Not having deep enough concentration — open.
Restlessness or distraction — open.

Intermediate Obscurations — Psychological and Conceptual Patterns

All habits of mind — seal as open.
All expectation of gain — open.
All fear of failure — open.
All doubt — open.
Bliss, stillness, and luminosity — all special states open.
Any sense that your personal practice has limitations — open.
Any sense that you yourself have limitations — open.
Waiting for something to happen — open.
Seeking an outcome — open.

Subtle Obscurations — Structural and Ontological Constructs

The object of meditation — open.
Meditating itself — open.
The meditator — open.
The sense of time — open.
The very movement of looking — open.
The impulse toward becoming, improving, or arriving — open.

The strongest realizations come when we see that even the mistakes we cling to — from dullness to time itself — are open. Everything is seen and known as open.

Look with the immediacy of awareness — with the intention to seal everything, as it arises, as open.

Keep practicing until immediacy develops its own momentum and every seeming arising — coarse or subtle — is seen as open.

As everything arises automatically as open, experience begins to have a softness or buoyancy — like snowflakes on warm rocks.