[One] mindfulness meditation technique is termed choiceless awareness or bare awareness. In this technique, we begin by paying attention to the sensation of the breath (this settles the mind and body), but then the instruction is to let our attention rest on whatever is most prominent in our field of awareness. This is… awakening by engaging the whole of our experience fully, however it presents itself. In the quotation that begins this chapter, Indian spiritual teacher and philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti uses the word “freedom” to describe this awakening. As a meditation practice, choiceless awareness is similar to the Zen meditation technique known as shikantaza, which roughly translates as just sitting. I love the idea of just sitting, although for me, just lying down will do—which takes me to my number one rule regarding meditation: be flexible.
Toni Bernhard, How to Wake Up
Gradually I have come to realise that the phrase choiceless awareness is not just yet another technical term for one technique among the many kinds of Buddhist or related meditation, but a vital descriptor of what actually happens when we sit in stillness. Choicelessness is the open and unreserved receiving of whatever arrives – be it bodily sensation, sound, thought, desire, emotion or whatever – as simply an arising within consciousness. It is the grounding of our own awareness in the ground of being itself. There is nothing else, nowhere to go, no thing to find.
Krishnamurti himself did not prescribe a practice, or technique, for achieving choiceless awareness; in fact he actively avoided doing so. He was strongly opposed to any suggestions that the path to this open awareness might be marked by stages of realisation: he believed that choice – in the sense of selecting any object of attention over any other – should just stop. When I first encountered the teachings of Krishnamurti, in my twenties, I found this fiercely frustrating. I thought I needed instructions, techniques, a programme. “Just tell me what to do!” (Perhaps this was one reason among several that I so readily fell in with the Christian contemplative tradition when I encountered it in person a few years later.) But, unsurprisingly, Krishnamurti was the wiser…
This journey I am proposing that we take together is not to the moon or even to the stars. The distance to the stars is much less than the distance within ourselves. The discovery of ourselves is endless, and it requires constant inquiry, a perception which is total, an awareness in which there is no choice. This journey is really an opening of the door to the individual in his relationship with the world.
Jiddu Krishnamurti: Madras, 7th Public Talk, December 13, 1959 Collected Works, Vol. XI
As Toni Bernhard suggests in the passage above, shikantaza is perhaps one way to square the circle. Brad Warner puts it like this:
When we do nothing but practice sitting still for a certain amount of time each day, it becomes clear that past and future are an illusion. There is no past. There is no future. There is only this moment. This one tiny moment. That’s all there is.
And in this moment what can you attain? You have what you have right now. Maybe in the future you’ll get something. But that’s not now.
Attainment always happens in the future or in the past. It’s always a matter of comparing the state at one moment to the state at another moment. But it makes no sense to compare one moment to any other moment. Every moment is complete unto itself. It contains what it contains and lacks what it lacks. Or perhaps it lacks nothing because each moment is the entire universe.
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