Lesson 6: Some Practical Things
about Naked Awareness

Let’s step back for a moment and look at how we can practice Naked Awareness.

With Naked Awareness, there isn't a big focus on scheduled daily practices. That doesn't mean that you won't profit with a certain amount of personal discipline, or that you shouldn't do your daily meditations. You can tell when your other practices help you, and, if they do, by all means continue. However, the practice of Naked Awareness doesn’t have to take place in a special time or place that you set-aside just for that. In fact, it is best if it occurs in the broadest context of your daily life.

The things we do in a Naked Awareness practice are just launching points. It's important to not only wake up when you are in a formal meditation, but to wake up spontaneously throughout the day. By increasingly becoming familiar with pure awareness and the base, it becomes easier and easier to make that step any time and in any situation. Over time, it will just blend in with the way you are and you won't even have to think about it. It becomes your natural state. That's what we are going for.

Naked Awareness starts with the easy steps first. You try to become familiar with the nature of awareness in small incremental steps. There isn't any expectation, at least in the beginning, of having pure awareness immediately available to you when you are in a big crisis. That will come with time, but we work on these understandings in the small motions, small thoughts, and small events first. Over time, the benefits of pure awareness will be available to you during more significant events in your life.

With Naked Awareness, you do small, subtle things to handle the grossest aspect of any problematic conditions that you face. You start not with creating a big effect, but creating a small effect. You just taste the essence of awareness a little bit. You just touch the base momentarily to realize its nature. You don't try to get a big, deep, Oscar-winning spiritual experience right away. For example, in our Preparation For Contemplation meditation, you set out to get just a little taste of the pure states of stillness, silence, and non-conceptual mind. If you can't get the actual things, you can just imagine getting them. Over time, it will get easier. You relax into emptiness, not struggle for it.

Naked Awareness stays focused on the direct experience of the essence of mind. We keep doing more or less the same thing, going for awareness of awareness and the base. We learn as much as we can about that core topic, becoming more and more familiar with it. We don't chase after things that come up in the mind as a result of these efforts. We don't chase after memories. We don't get into all of the philosophical or speculative issues that it can bring up. We don’t try to ferret out mental hang-ups or past upsets and try to resolve them. You can still do that, but that’s a different practice. The practice of Naked Awareness is just a one-pointed exploration of the deep essence of what is called in the literature "primordial awareness." We steadily keep that focus.

Becoming familiar with pure awareness and the base is best accomplished by relaxing rather than willfully trying to achieve something. That is why there is a general recommendation to avoid "chasing after" experiences. In the Bön Dzogchen tradition, one reads that Bönpos take a vow to give up moving, speaking, and thinking. This doesn't mean that you sit like a stone, silently, with a blank look on your face! It means that when you try to directly experience pure awareness you do not chase after the experiences of the body, speech, or mind that can arise. You let all of that go.

To summarize:

• Naked Awareness is practiced many times throughout the day, not only at special times.
• Do the easy steps first; do little things to deepen awareness.
• Develop pure awareness through relaxation and letting go.
• To experience pure awareness, don't chase after thoughts.

By now you should know if you are getting anything from these lessons. I hope you are, but, if not, that’s OK too.

The next lesson takes you to the source of creation.