Reading Highlight

Close your eyes and sit quietly for a moment and become aware of the complete range of your inward experience. Everything you notice including all thoughts, images, and emotions are formations of mind. Now open all your senses and observe what the mind sees, hears, smell, tastes, and physically detects. This too is form. Anything internally and everything externally observable is form. Now turn to awareness that cannot be observed through the senses. Awareness cannot be objectified, but you may have a felt sense of it. Try sensing the seeing that is giving rise to the sights you see: that is awareness. In this exercise you are not interested in the objects of sight but in the seeing. Awareness itself is impossible to see because it is what is seeing. Work with the phrase, “That which is heard is not that which hears.” The sound is form, the space in which sounds are heard is the formless. If you think about awareness and give it qualities, you will have made awareness into a form. Only a form can be grasped, and once the formless is formed by the mind, it can be desired and craved like any object.