Awareness

Are you aware?  No, not aware of the present moment, I mean are you aware?  Consider the goals of your meditation practice: what qualities do you hope to cultivate through it?  Mindfulness? Equanimity?  Presence?  To be free from the fetters of craving, aversion, and attachment?  The unhurried, unbiased, unadorned pure experience of the moment, as all thoughts are drained of their gravity?

Now, contemplate the characteristics of awareness - not what you are aware of (i.e. the content), but what awareness is, how it operates, how it behaves.  

Awareness could be characterized as the perpetual middle of the hourglass.  It presents each moment unhurriedly, attaching neither to past nor future.  It is Imperturbable.  Steady.  Undistractable.  It is the embodiment of all of the qualities we are seeking in meditation in their most pristine and effortlessly conceived form.

The overlap is striking.

We can ask: is awareness itself not then the greatest teacher we could ever hope to learn from?  In observing the characteristics of awareness at work, can we not find a more ideal role model to emulate?  Awareness seems like a front row seat to a master class, in which the very virtues we strive to attain can be beheld in perfection without venturing outside our minds at all, to any master, any book, any technique. 

Just ask what awareness is, what it is doing, and study it as the blueprint for tranquil, undistracted equanimity.  And when we inevitably fall down, study it further.

For so long I had it in my head that the goal was to become more aware, more mindful of the present.  What if, instead of framing the goal as seeking to become more aware¹, we try to become more alike awareness? That instead of seeking to be more mindful of the present, but presently more like the pure mind?

Awareness is not reflecting on whatever the current objects of awareness are, but trying to reflect the qualities of awareness itself, that is, of holding the cloudiness of our own scattered, anxious minds up to the ideal of awareness, and seeing how the two conditions differ?

The Non-Dual

This seems like a helpful practical application for the concept in the midst of distractions during one’s practice, yet the notion that we do not have to go outside the mind to find this ideal invites our line of questioning to go further still: we can next ask next, where do I end and where does awareness begin?  

Is there any separation between the two, or - in aiming to strive to be like awareness - are we really saying that we are returning the self to a state of pure mind, of the clear blue sky, of oneness with the Tao?  

If being “mindful” is the state of being like pure mind - that we are nothing more than naked, present awareness, and that all moments simply rise and fall away - then anticipating the future, remembering the past, or thinking of "ourselves" as comprising some cumulative identity that accretes around us is only an attempt to adorn awareness with these impermanent thoughts, which are not "real" or tangible in any sense, but simply "thought objects" we are aware of, and which likewise rise and fall away. We find that the only thing that is constantly, eternally here with us is this process of awareness itself.

So perhaps in actuality then there is no separate "self", no division between “me” and awareness.  Maybe rather they are one and the same, and we should not strive to be like awareness, but realize instead that ultimately we are nothing more than awareness already?  And if we already are awareness, indistinguishable from it, any notion that we are anything more than present awareness, that conceiving of a “self” that is something outside of and seeking to “emulate” awareness is simply hanging so many clouds in front of a clear blue sky?

That awareness is simply a synonym for “me”, for “you”, for “us”.

1. Of course, it is never a bad thing to become more aware either, so long as we are also aware of awareness.