The word Buddha means “I am
awake.” The last words of Jesus before his arrest in the garden were also “Stay
awake” (Matthew 26:38). To be awake is to be fully
conscious. The Buddhists sometimes call it “object-less consciousness”; I might
just call it “undefended knowing.” It is a consciousness where we are not
conscious of anything in particular but everything in general. It is a
panoramic receptive awareness—whereby you take in all that the moment offers
without eliminating anything or attaching to anything. You just watch it pass.
This does not come naturally to us, surely not in our
culture. We have to work at it. All forms of meditation and contemplation teach
some form of compartmentalizing or limiting the control of the mental ego—or
what some call the “monkey mind,” which just keeps jumping from observation to
observation, distraction to distraction, feeling to feeling, commentary to
commentary. Most of this mental action means very little and is actually the
opposite of consciousness. In fact, it is unconsciousness. It is even foolish
to call it “thinking” at all, although educated people tend to think their
self-referential commentaries are high-level thinking.
Richard Rohr
