The dharma works at every level of consciousness. As ordinary life flows along, you turn towards the dharma whenever you wonder how to be thoroughly present. What is the true nature of this presence? Resting all your awareness on the body experience is a reliable starting point for investigating this. Only ever right here, body sensations orient us immediately to the moment at hand, to the conditions at hand. In zazen, is the body upright? Does your posture support the spine? Are you breathing? What do the hands feel like? Where is your vision resting? Are you gazing at the floor 3 to 5 feet ahead or on the patterns playing on the inside of your closed lids? Or are there images in your minds’s eye? Do you notice the thought paths in the thinking mind? In a state of full attention, you are bearing witness to the most immediate sensation of the self, we call “me”. The self that we identify with as “me”. Then we keep going. Always going beyond.
