NEW MOON - Wednesday 10th April 2013

Appreciative awareness leads to life;
heedless avoidance is the path to death.
Those who are truly aware are fully alive,
while those who are heedless are as if already dead.

Dhp. v. 21

We all know the Buddha praised the cultivation of awareness. But how do we know the right thing to be aware of in any given moment? The objects are so varied: sights, sounds, smells, tastes, sensations and mental impressions. One exercise in awareness could be simply attending to the changing, unstable nature of all things; until we start to see them as unreliable, not really worth clinging to. This is to be aware of the characteristic of the ‘contents’ of experience. What happens if we direct awareness towards the ‘context’ of experience? Is the characteristic of the context in which all objects of attention manifest the same?

With Metta,
Bhikkhu Munindo