Awareness without an Object

 During the group practice last night, Venerable GuoXing talked about ignorance as being the fundamental belief that awareness requires an object. All too often, I listen to this sentence without fully understanding it. I almost want to analyze it for its essence, because it seems very mysterious: how did awareness get to believe that it needs an object to "exist"? And how, in turn, does this cause the cycle of ignorance?

   The problem, as I understand it, is that awareness might be a bit like a movie screen that temporarily forgets that all the images projected upon it are not real. Imagine this movie screen that is fully aware of its nature as "that which projects images". The movie screen is fully aware of the images as images, and is attuned to the way that, in spite of the diversity of the images seeming to come and go, in fact the screen itself remains essentially the same throughout the process. In other words, even if one image is of a "good" person while the other is of an evil demon or killer, the screen remains unaffected, because the essence is the same--the appearances are fundamentally the same as well. 

    So, in the midst of all this, the movie screen somehow gets enthralled in the drama, and starts to become extremely involved in what the images seem to be doing to each other. I wonder if you have ever had those cartoon books as a child where you continually flipped the pages until you saw images appear to "move"? Well, it's for sure something like this: I am thinking that there are moving images because I compare the position of one image to the other. My mind links these images into a continuous storied movement, and this is what causes these images to appear to be continuous and permanent, when in fact they disappear just as instantly as they arose. These images are literally just "instants" that are supplanted by other instants, without a sense of time shifting or moving.

  To become enthralled is to start to believe that the movie screen is part of the unfolding images. It sees itself as a character, or takes the side of one identity among others, and sees itself as one against the others, not realizing that it is the entire screen. I like this, I don't like that--I get this, I don't get that, etc. And all because we identify with one "perspective" within the screen rather than simply realizing that all these impressions are instances of the very same awareness. At this point, the screen becomes so forgetful of itself that it identifies completely with the moving images and starts to create things out of it: habitual ways of directing experience so that the portion it identifies with gets to win, or be on top, or survive to live to the next sequel, and so on.

  Something to contemplate: how can we go back to our original nature as the screen? Perhaps there is no going back at all--because in fact trying to "go back" to something original would be like imagining there is an object called a screen, when in fact the screen is just our total awareness in the moment, and so it cannot really be objectified. And this is awareness without an object. Can we just be without an object even for a moment? I dare you to try!