How Open Awareness Meditation Leads to Ending Suffering

Open Awareness Meditation (OAM) has slowly but surely gained following in the Buddhist meditation world. As that happens, some people wonder if it is a new kind of meditation, and whether it leads to ending suffering.

First of all, OAM is not something new. It’s just a modern name for satipaṭṭhāna (establishing of mindfulness). It’s a helpful new name to counter the popular misconception that meditation is necessarily about concentration. Instead of increasing concentration, OAM is about increasing awareness.

Think of awareness as a light, and the mind as a room without windows. The stronger the light, the more we can see in the room. What we eventually want to see is the whole room, so that we can see all that is there, so that we can remove the useless stuff and clean out all the dirt in the room. To do that, we need to have a bright light. In the same way, we need to have a bright awareness, so that we can see all that is in the mind, so that we can remove the useless stuff and clean out all the ‘dirt’ in the mind.

Cultivating awareness is like turning on an old-fashioned floodlight. When you first turn it on, it’s very dim. But if you keep it on, the light will slowly get brighter and brighter. The same is true for cultivating awareness. If you keep it on, the awareness will slowly get stronger and stronger. However, while for the floodlight you just need to flip a switch and wait, for awareness you have to learn how to sustain awareness.

When the light of awareness is somewhat bright, we get to see some major hindrances to the work of cleaning the mind. So, first we clear off these hindrances. After that comes the real work. This is when we meditate at a higher level.

At this level, unwholesome qualities cannot disturb the meditating mind, because they are either absent or separate from the meditating mind. This condition allows us to easily watch them objectively. Being able to know unwholesome qualities as they are, it is easy to let them go, thus reducing suffering.

This is also when insights can occur and impact your underlying tendencies. Don’t expect them though. They never occur when you have even the slightest expectation. Just keep up the practice, which has become easy and comfortable.

As you do the above, passion (rāga), aversion (dosa), and delusion (moha) are being exhausted, thus leading to the ending of suffering.

(Note: For meditation to bring about the ending of suffering, it needs the support of training in behaviour and discernment. For elaboration on this, see “Why Many People Don’t Suffer Less Despite Years of Meditation”.)

 

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