Guided Audio Meditation - Toward Open Awareness

There is an eccentric but compelling image that was used by some teachers in classic Buddhism regarding the working of human perception and cognition. Picture a wild monkey (you’ve almost certainly heard the terms “monkey mind” before). Except now, the monkey is living in a one room cabin, and the cabin has six windows. Let’s call it, “Casa Monkey.”

The monkey who lives here is basically good and curious, but the monkey is also completely untrained and overwhelmed, and there is A LOT happening out each of the windows (this cabin isn’t in the woods somewhere - thanks to the technology of the 21st century, this monkey lives in a cabin at the busiest intersection in the largest metropolis you can imagine). And much of what is happening out the windows is utterly heartbreaking and destabilizing. If we let the monkey run wild and leave all the windows open, the monkey might go wild, and the inside of the cabin is going to be an intolerable mess, almost instantly.

The monkey represents the attention aspect of mindfulness, and the six windows represent the five sense perceptions along with the sixth, which is the window of mental phenomena like thoughts, emotions, images, memories, and so on.

Congratulations, you have a pet monkey. The monkey is yours. You can’t kill the monkey, you can’t disown the monkey, and you would never want to do those things, anyway. The monkey is basically good, and perhaps even GREAT. It just needs to understand itself a little more fully in relationship to the house it occupies and the scary world outside the cabin. If we want the monkey to settle down, make less of a mess, and even come to appreciate and love a world in turmoil, we need to figure out a healthy relationship to this little house (which is our foundational awareness itself), and to the six “sense windows.”

So the first thing we might do is put out a comfy cushion, coaxing the “monkey mind” to slow down for even just a moment. We might also throw some black-out curtains over some of the windows to make the monkey less distractable, like when you find a quiet spot to do your practice (throwing a curtain over the “sound window”) and maybe closing our eyes or lowering our gaze (eyelids are quite literally blackout curtains for our “sight window”).

But as the monkey settles, even just a little bit, we need to learn to let the sunshine back into the house of awareness. After all, we don’t meditate to escape from the world; we do it to prepare to inhabit the world more completely. So as we play with letting the world into our formal meditation more and more, we begin to experiment with the radical step of letting the monkey open up ALL the windows and see what the world has to offer in this fresh, present moment.

This is the movement toward “Open Awareness” meditation. We will be working with this movement in the Thursday meditation group for paid substack subscribers over June, July and August. Please free free to subscribe to have access to the guided meditation, and also to join this awesome group of practitioners on Zoom.

Here are four things to remember as you work with this guided practice and begin to move toward Open Awareness meditation.