First awareness refers to your awareness in the here and now, basically your conscious awareness, but which can be transcended with this meditation to get to a non-conscious state. By non-conscious state we mean one where we are neither asleep nor awake, but in the Great Nothingness, not even self-aware. That does happen to also be a nourishing, regenerative, clarifying, energizing mental state, and is known for relieving daily stresses, and even deeper programs and densities. If in your meditation you lose track of your hands and/or feet, or even more, you know you’re on the right track.
You can also slip into second awareness with this one. If you find yourself experiencing things that are not really about you, or having thoughts that aren’t your thoughts, seeing people you don’t really know, or seeing vividly clear imagery that doesn’t resemble your local environment, stuff like that, you have probably gone into second awareness.
This one is done sitting comfortably with your back as upright as possible but with comfort being your higher priority. If you can arrange some pillows behind your head so that you can lean it back against them, all the better. The reason for this is once you sink deeply into the meditative states, your chin can dip forward as though you’re falling asleep, and your head can wind up bobbing up and down during the whole thing. When it does that, you’ll probably come out of the meditation, but which is easy to once again dip into. Staying in the meditation helps, and with your head comfortably leaning against the pillows, you’ll find it helps a lot. You can get to states so deep that you might actually drool.
The Technique
What you do is simple. If you have some alchemy, use it first, ingesting or anointing or both, arrange your sitting arrangement for maximum comfort, sit down and put the eyemask on. Start breathing deeply and evenly. If you have the oval breathing down, go ahead and use it. With eyes open, stare at the blackness inside the eyemask while emptying your mind. Replace any thoughts of any kind with the continued watching of the blackness. Continue that for anywhere from 2 to 5 minutes, or as long as you can. If the sleep hormones start to flow, you might find yourself unable to keep your eyes open, and it could really be a struggle to do so. That’s the time to close them. Then you are doing nothing but observing yourself watching the blackness behind your eyelids, inside the eyemask, continuing to replace any thoughts of any kind with the observation of the blackness, or with your observation of yourself watching the blackness.
If not using an eyemask, you should get one, but if you refuse to do that, just skip the eyemask part of it and start with your eyes closed.
Anywhere from 15 to 45 minutes is plenty with this one. It’s an interesting one in that you will likely continue in a non-conscious state right up until it’s time to be finished. There is some natural system in place to keep you from overdoing it, especially with continued practice.
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