Dhamma Everywhere

At the Alexis Santos retreat last year, he gave all of us a copy of his teacher Sayadaw U Tejaniya's little Dhamma Everywhere book.  It was interesting though strange to be encouraged to read a few pages of the book while on retreat; meditation and words still don't mix all that well for me.  But in retrospect, the exercise was very revealing.  Trying to bring the dhamma to everyday life in the simplest possible terms is the core of Tejaniya's teaching.  What good are fancy concentration techniques and exalted states if they fall apart the moment we have a conversation or even just pick up a book?  Instead of providing an elaborate theory or set of special practices, Tejaniya encourages us just to keep investigating what's happening in awareness right now.  While at first this might sound like mindfulness 101 or perhaps something similar to noting, it quickly becomes clear that awareness is a broader concept than attention or focus.  Tejaniya's goal is an awareness wide open and unfixated, even temporarily.  So instead of focusing on noting the details individual objects, he's really interested in our being aware of the moment to moment quality of our awareness itself.  Is there craving present in the way we're aware right now?  Is there aversion?  The idea is that if we just keep checking what we are aware of, we gradually build up a picture of the patterns in our mind, the habits of thought that dictate not only which objects we are aware of, but how we are aware of them.  Ultimately then, we become aware of awareness itself, so to speak. Which might just be the end.  Or the beginning.