For some months now, I have been dictating to ChatGPT instead of typing to it. It is easier. And its transcription is pretty good. But doing so feels scary, too. What if a transcription fails? Ten minutes of spoken flow goes poof!

Whereas typing is slower. Writing by hand is even more so. There is something about it that sort of gives it a feeling of permanence.

Even then, I wonder. Am I actually writing what I intended to write? Or am I just improvising, letting thoughts spill out one after another?

Trying to Explain Awareness While Writing

Is this presence? I mean right now. Am I aware? Or am I just thinking out loud?

The rule of thumb to know if you are aware, as I remember it, is to withdraw attention from thoughts and return it to silence, to the one who is aware of the thoughts. To ask oneself, “Am I aware?”, as Rupert Spira would say.

Before I began to dictate all this, I was listening to Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now while I walked in the dusk. In one portion of the audiobook, he asks us to imagine ourselves as a cat waiting at the rat hole, alert for the next thought. “What thought are you going to come up with next?” the cat asks. The rat here is the thought, hiding, waiting for the cat to get distracted.

That image stuck with me. It conjured up in my mind the image of Tom with his mischievous smile, crouched at the hole, waiting for Jerry.

Tolle, in his book, also spoke about his time as a teenager, lying on the roof, gazing up at the sky. Awe-struck, marvelling at its vastness for hours and days.

Only later did he realise that blank awe was in fact a meditation. That was, in his words, paraphrased, letting the spaciousness of the universe become the spaciousness within. That spaciousness was Tolle’s thoughtless state. Where the mind stopped its chatter. The silence.

When Words Try to Hold Awareness in Writing

Maybe awareness for me lives in the silence between my lines. And not the lines themselves.

What if it is awareness that comes first? And my writing out these words is only a representation of what that awareness noticed?

But then, am I unaware as I write this out? Am I not conscious when I am writing? Is there no awareness in writing? Can I be aware even as I write my thoughts out? Is it possible for one to remain aware of oneself as one goes about doing his/her tasks? Am I already aware without realising? In my attempts to express through words whatever consciousness is noticing, am I no longer noticing?

It feels like I’m close, but missing something by a few inches. Maybe the fog itself is part of the practice. How does one practice presence in activity?

Does Writing Need a Purpose?

The questioning reminded me of Buddhist monks who painstakingly create mandalas, placing colored sand with such attention, only to sweep it away into water afterwards.

If I’ve put this much effort into writing out my thoughts, must it serve a purpose? Should it not see the light of anybody else’s awareness? Should I let a mandala I painstakingly created go into my trash bin? How do those monks even do that!

There seems to be a value system in me that says words I write should add value to someone else. Or else they’re wasted. I sense a wound beneath this belief. Something about usefulness and meaning. But I can’t quite touch it yet.

Maybe someday I will learn the acceptance of the impermanence that those Buddhist monks seem to have. Writing could be like that. Maybe the act itself is the meaning.

But I am not there yet. And hence here you are reading this. Some day.

Am I Aware?

I spent, what, about three hours, writing and rewriting this piece. Was I fully present for those three hours? How do those monks know if they were aware and present for the many days they take to create a mandala? How can I know if I was aware in each moment of the last three hours? Was I lost in thought?

Something in me reminds me of what I had heard Tolle or Spira say. The question isn’t if I was aware in the past two hours. But if I am aware of my thoughts and feelings, at this very moment. Yes, I am, at this moment.

Perhaps what I am writing out is just a translation of what I am aware of. And while I am translating what I am noticing, when I am writing it out, or dictating it out, I am not in full awareness. Perhaps it was awareness that reminded me of what I had heard from Tolle and Spira, which then led me to question if I am aware.

Maybe It Alternates

I become aware of something I need to write, and then I spend the next few minutes translating it into words. Then I become aware of something else, and dictate that out.

Maybe that is what we all do, every minute, but get swept up in the hustle and bustle, mistaking the noticing to also be a thought.

Maybe it is the silence in between that slurry of thoughts, which Spira says is more important. More important than the answers your thoughts come up with. Maybe it is the noticing of what I want to say, or write, that is more important than what I say. The silence you fall into when you ask, Am I aware? Perhaps that is the only real place to rest this question. Am I aware?