The good news: I wasn’t coming down with anything. That thought crossed my mind when I went to bed last night achy with a sore throat. Today I woke with no aches and pains and no sore throat.

I sat this morning before going to assist at NLP training. No guitar sounds, no sound machine. Just me and the white noise of the heater fan, which I turned off part way through my session when I felt too warm.

Awareness is the backdrop to everything. Thoughts may take up all my awareness. Then my awareness shrinks, becomes small, is limited to the thought.

Sometimes thoughts are barely discernible against the vast backdrop of awareness. Like, yeah, monkey mind is doing its thing, thinking thoughts, but these thoughts are happening to someone else far away, in slow motion in a foreign language.

Expansion, contraction, association, dissociation, attention, awareness, me, not me, being, doing, not doing… this is some vocabulary of meditation. Some may seem like opposites. They’re not. Only a continuum of experiences exists.

Maybe awareness is not just the backdrop to everything. Maybe it is everything.

Everything I know and experience, everything I have ever known or experienced, and everything I can ever know or experience, comes through awareness.

If awareness consists of the conscious and nonconscious minds, then my awareness is simply whatever I’m consciously aware of in any given moment, plus everything I’m not consciously aware of (i.e., everything else). Conscious mind is the island of the tonal, the nonconscious mind is the sea of the nagual, in Carlos Casteneda’s terminology.

The word awareness is a nominalization, a way to make a thing out of a process. The process is being aware.

Right now I feel like a stoner. Today a stoner, Friday a drunk. All welcome in this guesthouse. What’s in the fridge?