Conversations with Avant-garde Sages - The Wizard LLC

Conversations with Avant-garde Sages
TRIP: I have a number of friends who are actfully engaged in the
ripening of their spiritual lives, and I've had numerous occasions
where people have reported to me where they've lost it and I'm
sure you have too, where people talk about they've lost that feeling
of centerness or whatever. And I've looked inside myself and I've
asked myself what does it mean for me when I lose it, and for me
it's always a shift of my attention away from awareness without
thought into anything else, and it happens a lot. I mean, I have to
admit that my attention being shifted away from awareness into
everything else is pretty much a predominant factor in my life
now, but I don't care because my attention always comes back to
awareness. So even though obviously I'm not a realized sage, I do
feel a possibility of relaxing into what wants to happen, because I
know that awareness is going to come back again. So I guess my
question is can you elaborate a little bit more on what losing it is
really, when people express that feeling they've lost it, what's really
going on.
PETER FENNER: Yes. That's an important question. Because
people often have that experience, what happens is that if we're
authentically resting in awareness itself, we're not resting in
anyone, there's no one resting in anything, so we can't lose this.
But what happens is that when we're resting in awareness, it's
often accompanied by nice feelings, there are sensations and
feelings that come along in the slipstream of resting in awareness.
They can often be feelings of tranquility because our mind can
slow down, because that whole enterprise of trying to understand,
trying to create meaning, there's less energy involved in that, so
the mind slows down, more or less tranquil. We go inside, we can
experience incredible states of bliss, sometimes like sensate states
of bliss, and we can say where the bliss is coming from. At other
times it's unconditioned bliss, we can't say from where it's arising,
it's like this amazing infusion of bliss energy throughout
awareness. So what happens is people begin, they identify
nondual awareness with these beautifully experiences of less
thinking, deep tranquility, and bliss, they are conditioned
experiences, they're things that are happening. Like tranquility, as
540