The ocean of awareness

Here's another paragraph from John Welwood's Toward a Psychology of Awakening. I selected this passage simply because I found it so inspiring.

Meditation is designed to help us move beyond the surface contents of the mind. Underneath the mind's surface activity - the vivid whitecaps of thought and emotion as well as the subtler flows of felt sensing - the ocean of awareness remains perfectly at rest, regardless of what is happening on its surface. As long as we are caught up in the waves of thought and feeling, they appear solid and overwhelming. But if we can find the presence of awareness within our thoughts and feelings, they lose their formal solidity and release their fixations. In the words of the Tibetan teacher Tarthang Tulku, "Stay in the thoughts. Just be there...You become the center of the thought. But there is not really any center... Yet at the same time, there is...complete openness.... If we can do this, any thought becomes meditation." In this way, meditation reveals the absolute stillness within both the mind's turbulence and its relative calm.

I find it very encouraging to realize that even when I'm not in formal meditation sitting, I can use whatever my mind needs to be thinking about as meditation if I simply stay in the thought and be there. Also please notice that we don't have to create the calm. It is there all the time. It is found within the "ocean of awareness" that we all have even if we're not awake to its reality. So, once again, the teaching is to wake up!