Nondual Awareness: Insight

Abstract

Without an observer.Nobody on the cushion meditating.Every thing on the cushion meditating.[#635] I perceived subject and object as the same substance, facing each other like the two inner surfaces of a folded sheet of paper.As if subject and object were created by folding the fundamental substance and the observer were placed arbitrarily on one of the two sides.[#2916] There was a permeability; self-image and infinity somehow fell into one.[#3024] Awareness is a nonconceptual way of knowing one's own inner model of real ity, a form of knowing that itself often goes unnoticed.Phenomenologically, this knowing is direct and immediate because the experiential character of awareness itself is almost transparent ( we'll think more about this in chapter 28; see also figure 34.1 in chapter 34).If you will, the awareness itself is not part of our inner model of real ity-and meditators are people who change that.Often, the inner model includes an explicit repre sen ta tion of a subject and an object component, for example a "knowing self" that directs its attention toward some perceptual object, or a thinker of thoughts who then categorizes perceptions, actively using thought and memory.This knowing self is precisely what, in chapter 25, I called the "epistemic agent model."Whenever the epistemic agent model is transparent, the result is an ego: an apparently immediate and direct experience of a knowing self with which we identify.What the phenomenology of meditation practice shows is that awareness can also occur without any explicit represen ta tion of subject and object.To use our brand-new conceptual tool, awareness can exist without an epistemic agent model.The experience of directly knowing inner real ity does not have to be contracted into a self and a first-person perspective because it can also occur in a "nondual" way.