(Rob L: I transcribed this because of the question Shawn asks around 52 minutes in …
{Note have tried to make it read without pauses and emotions, so listen for the emotive effects of the dynamics of Shawn and Jan’s voices}
00:52:08
S
N: I was curious, I have heard you mention the words consciousness, attention and awareness almost interchangeably and I was curious if that is true, or if you would differentiate between those three terms?
00:52:28
JF: I think I use them more or less interchangeably and I know different people use one of those words in a different way, one thing I would say about it is, consciousness, what I think of as consciousness
00:52:46 … well … Can be just aware of of itself … hah … I am using aware there … hard to use language but I think attention, it’s useful to notice what goes on in terms of a person's attention, alongside thinking which is different. The way that we tend to learn about that and notice it is by seeing that we are attending something, our attention is on something in the outer world, sometimes on the interior but the more obvious way is having to deal with the immediate environment, something sensory or in motion. So, we can notice attention to something out there, so it feels like attention has an object.
00:53:40
As I experience and sometimes use the word consciousness, it could be used interchangeably, but it can also feel itself … it's like a container sensing itself that does not have to be something in it or something, that it is on.
00:54:02
For one thing in that way of that I am using consciousness there is a diffuse quality thats lets say softly attuned to anything in the field of consciousness, it is not focussed the way attention often is so sometimes if I am in a deep conversation with someone, and I am directing my attention to a look on their face or the words they are saying or the words I am saying, I will lose all track of the hunger in my belly or the pain in my foot.
00:54:36
Consciousness what I think of as consciousness is softer and it is not directed in a certain direction necessarily, it more soft kind of attunement or alertness. But I am making a distinction here only that I think can be useful to somebody when they are trying to notice what is, what does attention feel like, it is easier when it is on something.
00:55:04
SN: Does the idea, you mentioned being aware of consciousness, I think that's how you phrased it. Does your mind or does your experience, or did you have the experience of being
… what am I searching for here … There is a paradox here of how can consciousness be aware of itself, how can a thing know of itself?
00:55:45
I bring this up because, in meditation for years I was hung up on, ok there is this awareness and now I am aware of this awareness and now it seems like there are two awarenesses inside of me and they were always flipping back and forth from one to the other and I could never feel like, “I am that awareness” because there was always this shifting thing. Does that ring any bells with you?
00:56:20
JF: Can you say any a little bit more about what the first one, what you described as the initial consciousness? What were you conscious of?
00:56:28
SN: Okay, okay … In a typical meditation practice, a vipassana practice where you you are being aware of your breathing, let’s say, or you are noting things, a thought comes up and you literally note it, of okay, anger, happiness these different things come up and you note them and move on. At some point that quiets down and there is just an, there just like a space in which things appear and I would call that awareness, … but then there will be a moment of resting in that awareness and then suddenly there’s the sense of being aware of resting in that awareness … and that always befuddled me, is how could I … if what we are is awareness, for example as a concept … in experiencing that it always seemed there would inevitably be some other awareness of that some other observer of this process.
00:57:44
JF: My sense of what goes on is that when … in the first thing that you described … you are sitting and notice a thought, or breathing, sound in the room, as soon as you ... no lets just say interior things not sound in a room … but as soon as you notice, as soon as awareness or consciousness notices something that going on in the mind … then it stops
00:58:24
… and so … usually … and so then absent anything to focus on or to give attention to the awareness then has the leisure the luxury to notice itself … that is my sense of what happens … and so it … but really it could say if we are spaciousness … the thing that is going on the whole time … even when you notice that there is a negative thought … the thing that is doing the noticing is not experiencing the negativity … alright … it’s seeing it!
00:59:13
An so there is evidence there … you know … if you have eyes to see it … there is evidence … the important thing that is going on there is not the seeing of the negativity, it is certainly not the negativity, it is the fact that there is something in my conscious awareness, that can see, that is not subject to the thing it is seeing … and as soon as that happens the predominant reality, or the restfulness of that seer … you could say … just wants to be with itself.
00:59:55
But as soon as, if a person, if the mind turns on at all, then we retreat from that. The premise of all of it, what is it in me that is doing this … and I think what happens when consciousness is just sensing itself is that the sense of any self has disappeared, fleetingly, usually.
01:00:27
and in fact I think people sometimes have moments like that, that they do not retain, or remember later happened because their minds were so not in the picture then … but I also think, it is possible and I have seen this happen, to be … for the awareness to be aware of itself without that being a trigger for the mind and that can be retained later, that the mind can remember … I do not know how that happens but I have seen it many times.
01:01:10
So it is like something we were talking about a while ago, to me the useful thing to do when sitting in meditation or whatever, when awareness notices negativity, the useful thing to do there, is to be aware of, is to ask the question what is it that is aware of the negativity, not where is the negativity from or what can I do about it.
01:01:40
But what actual function in me is able to see? Where is it located? Some people have a sense of it actually being outside or bigger than or something ...
01:01:53
{Discuss about Sam Harris book “Waking Up: Spirituality without Religion, not transcribed all just snippet ….}
JF: Sam Harris looks at consciousness and asks just that question “How can consciousness become aware of itself?” The short answer is so far we cannot answer that question or how consciousness can recognise itself. But the book according to JF makes very compelling, ordinary, day to day non-spiritual observations about how a person can notice what is going on within themselves.
…
01:03:57
JF: I do not know it is a marvel to me. I feel very fortunate to be a human being, that can experience consciousness, sensing itself … it’s delicious.
01:04:10
SN: Do you find that people wind up wanting to chase a state of where they feel like they are more aware more of the time and that itself becomes another goal, of trying to see what some of the blocks if you will or side routes that people in your experience go down?
01:04:45
JF: What I notice happening, is even that happens for a while, if they become sort of addicted, to that feeling of it, because it rescues then from the pain of life or something … (SN: Exactly ..) … it is a motivator for a while, what happens and is so lovely and humbling to witness … The more a person actually experiences being in the present, regardless of how unpleasant it is, it really is all that is real, the more they tend to fall out of love with accumulating experience, or making a certain type of experience predominant, or achieving something or “waking up” and I think it is because, time and anything that can happen in time, has ceased to feel tangible to them …
01:05:50
… so ironically some of the people who have been the most devoted earnest seekers, stop being seekers, not because they necessarily woke up, but because … they forget to pay attention to much of anything else besides what is happening right now and they have little by little y learned that it hurts to resist … so they have come to rest in what is happening instead of trying to change it including trying to change themselves and their own experience.
01:06:28
Sometimes they will lament to me, they will say, I have lost interest in “waking up” … I just laugh … what more wonderful thing could happen.
01:06:40
So even if somebody is trying really hard to have that experience more often, it is probably not going to continue, anyway we cannot make those moments happen, we can’t make ourselves not be reactive, all we can do is see when we are reactive, we can see that we are in resistance, we are in our heads and we have been there for the last however long and as soon as you see that … it often softens … and yes it feels good and I encourage people to pay attention to how it feels - yes it feels lovely … and don’t let the next thing be how can I make this happen more.
01:07:30
SN: Yeah, that is a least a tendency that I see with teachings that point out, lets say, hey there is this awareness and it's here, and it’s always here and people get a sense of that say during a lecture or from reading a book, and the immediate reaction is “Oh I felt it” and now not I don’t feel it and now I want it again (JF: Oh my God … yes) … so I am going to go back to a lecture, more lectures, or sit in more satsangs, and so I can feel it more and more and more until I feel it all the time, or almost all of the time.
01:08:14
JF: Yeah, it does not work. If instead, such a person could make note of the wish to make it happen more and explore what it is in me that wants that it is the same machinery that suffers and it does not want to suffer, it wants to feel good. But we don’t put our attention in the right place. The tendency is to follow that desire and think how can I get it, I should go back to that teacher whatever (SN: Absolutely!). Instead if I were such a person and had that driving desire, if I could just pause for a second, “what am I really?” which is what the whole thing is about, “What am I really?” What is it in me that wants that? Until something leads us to look at that … we are still going to stay on the same loop.
01:09:10
And we might have peaceful moments of great insight but we did not cause them when they happened, we just didn’t … or if we did, it was in spite of our ... maybe if we can look back and say that it was something I did that brought that about, that’s what terrible suffering sometimes brings about in people, you can look back and say, wow, if my house did not had not burnt down my whole sense of myself might not have changed. We can see it in retrospect but, and there are obviously a lot of famous waking up stories, apparently precipitated by some devastation.
01:09:53
SN: Along that line perhaps there are a number of teachers who talk about the importance of earnestness and devoting attention, applying energy and determination and these sorts of very … perhaps masculine qualities of really going after something. Do you see a place for that or do you feel perhaps that those qualities tend to get in the way of what’s there?
[rlo: Alan Watts: “In my own way” - literally my own obstacle!]
01:10:28
JF: Oh, I think that it depends on how that thing expresses itself in a person’s experience and sense of themselves, if it feels like being a task master that’s one thing, it’s not something we can cause in ourselves, to be devoted, or to be earnest, it is something we either we naturally, we can’t help but, move towards something. But to encourage somebody to cultivate that kind of quality or trait if it isn’t naturally there probably isn’t going to get them anywhere but it can be fruitful to see if there is resistance and avoidance.
01:11:13
It looks to me like, in order to for us to benefit from life experience as it bangs into us all the time our willingness and Richard Rose talked about this , our willingness to as it were to sacrifice or to suffer anything without condition, if there is such a willingness, the chances are greater that our life experience will bear fruit.
01:11:45
If there isn’t a willingness, if there are conditions, I remember very clearly having some of my own conditions, that will surely interfere with the ability of life to teach us, so to me the useful thing is to look and see is, do I have a devotion, do I have an energy, a willingness to sacrifice everything or do we have a list of things that I am not willing to sacrifice.
01:12:15
To observe that these things are functioning can bear fruit, but to say I am going to get rid of the list - that is not how it happens. But as soon as we become aware that there are conditions or tendencies we have that can keep us from absolutely surrendering to life that can be fruitful. But that is really different from saying I am going to be vigilant and I am going to try really, really hard to not have negative thoughts, oh that is so exhausting it is so bad for people that do that and they do not get anywhere and they are tired from it and so discouraged. It is just because it does not work, it is the mind. So some people are naturally given to what you would describe as being devoted. { 01:13:25 ... gap about business …}
JF: Need to trust ourselves deeply, to deeply trust the longing for something and respond. Recipe for feeling more alive.
01:14:30
JF: It seems to me that the deeper we can see into ourselves, into what is fundamentally motivating us, the underlying desire or fear or whatever, it is, that’s when light begin to come on, but as long as we are operating even behaviourally over like what to do for a living, who do I spend time with, if we are operating at any kind of a distance from that deep deep motivation nothing really important is going to happen spiritually or otherwise, we are just going to keep feeling like we are really not living.
01:15:11 - Discussion about stuckness … films …. Feeling still in the natural world … cats …
01:24:00
Web site - get in touch etc
01:25:45
JF: If a person senses that there is more to themselves than their minds and their suffering I really encourage them to trust that deep knowing … and just to sit with that knowing … without necessarily saying now what do I do about it … they are tuning into something real and actual and precious, so precious.
01:26:16
SN: Thanks and ending.