I had the kitten on my lap out here yesterday. She was very nervous until she caught sight of birds flitting through the hedge, then her instincts took over. She transformed from a passive victim of overloaded stimuli to focused concentration--the bird mantra effect. I left her there following her bliss still when I checked back an hour later. Her ears seemed to chase each sound reflexively, moving this way and that like two satellite dishes whipped around in a windstorm. We humans operate the same way with all of our senses, chasing after stimuli like baying bloodhounds, then crunching them into concepts and judgments in the thought machine between our ears. Noticing all this, mindfulness, is the first step in freeing ourselves. Once mindful of its content, we begin to recognize consciousness as the ocean in which these fish swarm, and more, that consciousness is both source and substance, ubiquitous, omnipresent, all-pervading. I abide in it and of it, and this body-mind is apparently consciousness concretized. Emptiness lapsed into form. However, throwing nouns at it does it no more justice than a cat's ear in a flock of birds. What I feel is an immediate and vacant sense of being, bereft of body-mind, of subject and object, of identification with anything perceived or conceived. It feels pure and true, without center and without edge, and it precedes and pervades everything.
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