Become the Car

In the practice of meditation, there is a term for awareness, sheshin, which means knowing as it is or knowing things as they are. Awareness is sharpening our antenna, so that a visual, olfactory, auditory, sensory, total perceptual sense of expansion is taking place. It is analagous to driving a car. If we rent a car, at the beginning, when we first start driving, we are concerned about how the car accelerates and how to work all the little gadgets on the dashboard, and how to control the power and speed of the car. If you are an experienced driver, however, you begin to tune yourself immediately into the size of the car, whether it's big or small. Your whole awareness becomes the car, as if the car were your body. So you don't miscalculate the size of the car on the highway, and you know your size, its size, for parking, for that matter. In terms of awareness in meditation practice, we should similarly adapt ourselves. There is a sense of perception expanding, a sense of radiation and seeing how far our feelings extend. Our life situation, running our day to day life, also works that way.
From Talk Four of MEDITATION: THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA, a five talk seminar at Naropa University, July 1, 1974, Boulder, Colorado. Edited from the transcript.All material by Chogyam Trungpa is copyright Diana J. Mukpo and used by permission. OCEAN OF DHARMA QUOTES OF THE WEEK now has 5, 321 subscribers.Please send comments on and contributions to OCEAN OF DHARMA QUOTES OF THE WEEK to the list moderator, Carolyn Gimian at: carolyn@shambhala.com.
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