”Finding Natural Awareness”

Welcome to the Backyard Buddhist Podcast where we continually seek everyday enlightenment for the benefit of ourselves and all other beings. I am Ronn Pawo McLane and I am here with my good buddy Danny Hobart. Today we are talking about Natural Awakening. Your own spiritual compass starts with awakened awareness. With the lens of that awareness we see the natural state of consciousness as unstained, untarnished, and unaffected by stimulus. Reactions and emotions are constructs of the conditioned mind and therefore are simply the illusions and abstracts concepts of the ego mind. The natural state is spacious and formless. Within that state of awareness thoughts, feelings, judgements, emotions, and sensations come and go, arise, and settle but leave no trace. We can transcend the thrall of our reactions by simply seeing those emotions as reactions and intentionally turning our attention to the empty open awareness of our natural unaffected state. This awareness is always there it is never absent.