A Conversation About Awareness

I was in a conversation yesterday about awareness.  We were all talking about how wonderful it was, and how the world needed it, and what philosophies were connected with it, and what methods we used to teach it and learn it, etc., etc., etc., - words, words, words, nodding, agreeing, all of us building a common story with which we could relate to each other and to the concept of awareness and to the world.

And in the middle of the conversation, part of me stepped back and noticed that none of us, not one of us, was even noticing what was happening beyond the concepts we were talking about.  None of us were noticing, or commenting on, these four people, standing in a circle, with various emotions, motives, stories, fears, defenses, and egos surging inside of each person, that were actually happening in the current moment. Here we were, all students and teachers of awareness in various capacities, all talking enthusiastically about the philosophy of awareness, and none of us were aware of what was actually happening as we stood there talking words.

So I stopped, and listened for a while, and listened inside.  I noticed a feeling, quickly growing in me, of wanting to run away.  I watched myself smiling and nodding and agreeing, while inside, I noticed that I felt lonely, disconnected, alienated.  As I zoomed in a bit closer on those feelings, I noticed that I had a huge fear of being honest with them about what was happening inside - here I was, looking connected, looking like I was "one" with everyone else, while the painful reality is that I felt very separate.  And, being too afraid to speak out, now I saw that I was holding a secret from everyone else, a secret about who I really was in that moment, afraid to show it for fear I would disturb the wonderful glow of oneness everyone else seemed to be experiencing.  And holding that secret was itself contributing to my feeling of being alone.

The discomfort built and built, and now I could barely stand it.  Clearly, no one had a clue of what was going on inside of me - no one was aware of my turmoil.  Everyone seemed so caught up in their fantasy that we were all in agreement that no one was even looking at my body language, or noticed that I had fallen silent, or noticed that I was no longer smiling or nodding.  I felt shut into my own world, alone, unnoticed, and painfully aware of the irony of the situation.

Then I realized that I, by not sharing my reality, was contributing to the illusion.  By standing there silently when I desperately wanted to run away, I was speaking as loudly as if I was saying, "Yes, we are all one, yes, isn't it wonderful", and my very silent presence was a lie.  I did desperately want to share, but it was so intimate - intimate in the sense that revealing my alienation was very personal, and made me very vulnerable to rejection, misunderstanding, and even more loneliness than if I just remained silent.  Did I want such intimacy?  I always said I did.  And I knew these were probably safe people.  Yet I probably stood for 10 minutes, sweating, not daring to expose who I really was in that moment.

Finally, during a poignant moment, where it looked like people were basking in the full glory of the oneness of agreement, I spoke.  I told them of my alienation, of wanting to run away, of not feeling at all one with them, of withholding my secret because I was so scared.  I spoke of my fear of being rejected by them, of how hard it was for me just to be honest with them.  I desperately wanted to explain, excuse, theorize, anything to get away from the intense personal energy of the moment, but instead, I stopped talking and let the awkwardness of the moment sit heavy in the air.

We stood in that silence for a while.  Finally, someone else spoke heavily, as if they were trying to break through a fog.  They also talked about their alienation from the conversation.  They spoke of their anger at feeling controlled by others in the group.  Awkwardness and tension grew more, at least inside of me.  Okay, we were trying to be real, but what would come of it?  This did not feel good at all.  There were a few attempts to go back into our heads, where it had been so safe - saying how wonderful it was that we were able to express our feelings, how safe this must be to let ourselves do this - but the sense of hiding ourselves behind our words hung heavy in the air.

Slowly, painfully, inch by inch, each person started looking more inside, and noticed what they were doing, what they had been doing for the past 30 minutes without noticing.  We started to tune into the actual energy pulsing between us, to what our minds and emotions were doing.  We started to abandon concepts and theories and congratulations and hopes.  Each of us started to speak of our state in the moment.  You could see the struggle as each of us tried to deal with our own habits of mind, in order to live up to the goal we had silently set for ourselves - to be fully present to each other and to the current moment.

Then, slowly, we fell silent again - for myself, I started to feel how useless words were for our purpose.  Something important was happening, but any words we drew upon to try to describe it took us immediately away from it, and it seemed that only by standing in that awkward silence could we stay fully present to ourselves, and to each other.  And now when I looked inside, I discovered a calmness where there had been fear and separation - a silence where there had been tension and anxiety.  We soon separated with few final words, I imagine to attempt to not lose the experience of what had just happened.

The experience left me with many stories and interpretations which I would love to expound upon. But underneath, remembering the final silence within, the ending of chaos, seemed to be what I needed most to learn.  And even these words feel like a distraction, like the finger pointing to the moon rather than the moon itself.  But I can't cut and paste the moon into this text.

Words are a damn poor substitute for experience.