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Essays listed in chronological order starting with most recent. For archives, please see previous volumes below.
Writer's pictureRudy Bauer

The Place of Awareness and Awareness as Place


The Place of Awareness and Awareness as Place

1. We have been focusing within the gaze on the arising of the place of the gaze and on the gaze as the place of awareness. Sometimes it is useful to consider yourself as a place, the place of awareness, the place of the rigpa, primordial awareness manifesting in time and space in you as you. By place I do not simply mean that understanding reflecting where the entities are merely located. Rather more directly, the place of gnosis, jnana direct perception, place is the openness, the spaciousness, the light, of awareness in time and in space, in a body and in mind, in the mandala of unfolding, relentless undetermined circumstances. The place that disappears from this life and what remains is pure place. This place is the place of the kayas and the place of singularity, the place of uniqueness…difference within oneness…like ice and water. 

This great awareness, the great luminous expanse is experientially bound in a contained region of experience, a region in which we are open to the world and the world is open in us…the world is whole of being, universe, cosmos…it is out of this place that time and space emerge, and this place emerges in time and space. This place has a dynamic character, this movement is unfolding and is not simply static presence. In this way, this place that you and I are, is a happening and an event, a bringing forth, a coming forth of primordial awareness itself within form and shape. You are the place of awareness and awareness as place. The forms and shape disappear and place remains. 

2. This awareness is multidimensional and may seem like a triangle…at first glance contained in mind then opening as awareness of mind, then as this becomes aware of awareness itself, becomes aware of itself as field, opens and opens both horizontally and vertically. We hold awareness, we enter and we become awareness becoming that what we are…in this becoming we become beingness of being itself…as we become awareness the kayas, the very nature opens infinitely opens…translucidity opens as this seeing into and through the appearance of the world flesh, through the apparitional dimension of the cosmological and through the pure consciousness without name or form.

Translucidity is the state of non-duality and translucidity is non-duality within dualities. In essence, the place is translucidity…the freedom of translucidity to bring forth and destroy…benevolence and fierceness.

3. Moreover this place that we are as we enter deeply is nonlocal, but actually here and there…that is why we can resonate and transmit that which we are. As you and I know this is very simple and ordinary…although concealed so often. And so often divinity is seen only as entity, then within that view human beings become entities alone…this is the source of annihilation and deprivation.

Beyond words and letters, there is a transmission, the transmission does not belong to any tradition, it is the very nature of human awareness and that is the Buddha.

4. The bodhisattva posture is the capacity to transmit awareness itself to another. And in that transmission awakened awareness awakens awareness in the other. Human beings are fields within fields. Primordial awareness is both the circumstance and the experience of the circumstance.

5. The body energy centers…centers of energy and light. As the light expands, the capacity to transmit awareness increases. To do this one becomes field sensitive, and relates to the field within oneself and within the others, infinite others. Field sensitivity must be sustained, maintained. Every experience is experience through the field, the field is liberation from lockedinness, solipsism. The field knows the field, intensifies the field, whatever is experienced within the field is naturally liberated. Everything is within the field, nothing is beyond the field…the field is the plane of immanence. Everything, all events take place within the field of immanence…there is nothing to transcend. Life death take place within immanence…the in between opens us to the field being in the in between sustain the field and the in between is actually the openness of the field, and the light of the field. Whatever addiction stops you from being in the field must be metabolized…addictions dissociate us from the field.

6. The focus of becoming aware of awareness of gazing as we have been exploring is not to discharge, but the intensification is to maintain stability of intensity of light, assimilating and accommodating…at times plateauing and then continuing in the oneness of extension and gazing. Continuity of intensity!

7. The bodhisattva experience is being in the field with both beneficence and fierceness…this protection is within time and beyond time. Time is the manifestation of awareness within circumstances of appearance as flesh. Time is awareness itself in its manifestation. Timeless awareness in time and time in timeless awareness is our method. Kala time is the very manifestation of realization and also the manifestation of concealment…darkness…the demonic itself is simply ma rig pa. Concealment of what is being becoming beings in time…how we relate to time, live in time is dharma.

8. There are many traditions of energy and light. Some focus on the navel center, as the center of stability. Some remain centered on that dan tien center alone. Some center on the top of the head and some center through the whole body with the heart as the opening of light as source. This is the heart essence tradition as found in Kashmir Shavism, the Dzogchen tradition of heart essence, Hrdayam and in Qi Gong Yen Chin as heart mind tradition. This is heart essence tradition of Il Arbe of Sufism. This heart essence is found in many traditions including Gnostic Christianity. And the medieval alchemical was heart essence. Love is true alchemical substance…psyche and animamystic traditions are heart essence.

9. There is variation within the Tibetan Buddhism traditions on these issues of focus…Dzogchen of Longchenpa focuses on the heart essence. We will actually study words and meaning…seven treasures. The Christ consciousness is the tradition of the heart.

10. The field of awareness cannot be institutionalized…or presented as hierarchical frame. The frame is contradictory to equality consciousness. The hierarchical frame itself conceals the reality of capacity of transmission. The hierarchical enframing conceals the universal capacity…and presents hierarchy as the method. Much hierarchical expressions are left over royalty and its aspirations…there is a self-destructive element. The field as tradition is mastery transmitted through time generationally. Tradition is not impersonal, but completely made up of person relating through persons…sambogakaya touches nirmanakaya and is personalized. The personal is not entity, but reflects the agency of awareness…love as awareness…navel centered configurations can become easily non-personal.

11. Hierarchy poses as mastery. And mastery is concealed in hierarchy.

12. Language is the house of being…logos is manifestation of awareness. Symbols are the manifestation of awareness. Symbols are best known through the translucidity of awareness…not the signifiers of mind.

13. As we know there are different levels of language and symbol…from vibration, sound, image or symbols…to words and syllables and sentences.

14. Language can arise within the body of awareness; language can arise within the mind.

15. Sometimes we integrate the mind into awareness. And sometimes we suspend the mind to experience the self-arising of languaging of primordial awareness…the words arising out of awareness itself…awareness manifesting words and symbols. This requires suspension of mind, thought free state in order to experience the manifestation of word, poetic…word as symbol…direct knowing. Words as mind as mediated signifiers.

16. There is an ongoing commentary sometimes associated with witness consciousness. This commentary is a consistent enframing of experience…mapping of experience that is prereflective…this mapping is to give safety and security and yet the very mapping tends to be very young repetitious concrete operational…often in speech one may be a simple translator of the commentary. Sometimes the commentary is very abstract and so abstract that there is no connection to that which it is commenting on. This commentary is not the expression of the subject of awareness…but is recall, a reconfiguring memory that once worked but is forever continuing its security operations to overcome events that are not understandable since direct perception has been nullified. Translucidity darkened. At times, many forms of social interaction are often the translation of the commentary. The secret or hidden commentator is a sad substitute for non-conceptual understanding and for conceptual reflection. This commentator often arises in times of terror and anxiety and becomes identified as source of reality. It is not really a judgment but a simple redundant commentary of then reflecting historical redundancy. Sometimes the commentary is a thing unto itself and sometimes it reflects a kind of primitive object relations or even internalizations that are not truly ones own. This commentary can block or shield the nature of reality from being experienced directly. It is a kind of parrot.


Rudolph Bauer,Ph.D author

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