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Awareness Knowing Itself Sam Yau This poem continues the journey begun in The Mind Learns to Stay. If possible, read that poem first, then come here, so the movement from concentration into awareness can be felt as one unfolding path. I. The breath is still here, entering, leaving— but now it is no longer the only lamp in the room. Attention, once gathered to a single flame, widens— like rainlight opening over a field, like a hand slowly unclosing. II. Let all things arise without choosing— cloud across sky, ripple across water, wind moving through the grass, light along the wall, a bird’s one cry lost into distance, the small ache in the knee, air on the skin, sorrow’s pulse, joy’s shimmer, the faint stir of memory. III. Do not turn away what appears. Do not retain what leaves. Let each thing be briefly itself— before the mind lays its net of names, before meaning hardens, before story begins. See it in its first light. Watch it crest and disappear. IV. And then another opening— not only what is seen, but what is it that sees? What knows the breath, hears the bird, feels the ache, watches thought arrive and vanish? Who stands at the window of this passing world? What is the light by which the room is known? V. Then a quiet vastness begins to stir. The “I” grows wide, while its edges melt into light— wave and water, mirror and reflection, dream and dreamer— what once seemed two leans toward one. The boundary grows transparent. VI. Thoughts dwindle, feelings subside, the breath thins— until even the body seems to fall away, and the watcher, too, cannot be found. VII. As if one had stood a lifetime at a threshold, and entered at last. As if the seeker had gone silent, and what remains is only this— a stillness awake to itself, vast, luminous, at rest. Like light resting in light. Like coming home to a place you never truly left.