“Rest in or as Awareness.” In many teachings such advice is given as an answer to the question ‘What can I do?’ Of course there is not one answer that applies to everyone or to one person at every moment. There is a shadow hanging over every answer and the opposite of it is always just as right. Especially if one sticks to it!
If we stick to something chances are it becomes an activity. and as soon as resting in awareness becomes an activity an outcome is expected. Awareness has then been turned into a mental object and it’s results can or have to be enjoyed by someone. The wanted result probably being the experience of peace, love, freedom and the sweetness that comes along with it.
The someone that is doing the resting in awareness is not doing other things. He/She starts drowning in the self created honey pot that is still called awareness until slowly but surely the honey starts to feel so stickey the freedom that one graved for is lost. Sticking to resting in awareness we are walking away for unresolved conflicts, unanswered questions and/or bodily energies we don’t want to experience.
Resting in awareness could mean: seeing that everything is awareness and that nothing is an entity that is seperate from awareness. But once we are avoiding anything that is not as sweet as awareness we are adding reality to something seperate in real-life. We are no longer resting in awareness, we are locking ourselves up inside the honey pot and still call it awareness. But the sweetness is gone. When we are locking ourselves in, we are locking ourselves out.
These assumptions of how life should be can be more or less subtle. Someone once told me: “You don’t feel like bliss right now.” It probably implied that there should be bliss. Maybe even above all else. Or at all times.
Such assumptions about how life should be like this or that, turn life into something stickey. The result is that we will find ourselves either apperently glued to the inside of the honey jar or locked out of it. At these moments we find that both the honey and the lid that locks us out are made of the same sticky stuff as the belief or expectations we are holding on to. And that they cannot be excluded from awareness.
Life is not always just sweet. At times it tastes bitter sweet, sweet & spicey, painfully sweet, fucking sweet or not sweet at all.
There are no tastes to be avoided. Life is always damn tasty! Simply because there is nothing in life we don’t want. Everything that arises is already accepted, it arises out of the awareness we are, is made of awareness and is the experience of awareness itself. This recognition of awareness being everything can bring about a feeling we call love, sweetness or bliss.
Experiencing this feeling is not the result of something or of someone resting in or as awareness. It is the by-product of awareness recognizing itself in the illusion called ones life. It is the taste of a honey that does not stick. The enjoyment of it is not something real. And although pleasant it is an illusion not even worth resting in awareness for.
Let’s not rest but live as awareness! …without sticking to it.
