Awareness

There’s a lot of talk in our small sangha at the moment about doing something and doing nothing meditations and the thread that runs through this all is the nature of awareness. Sitting this morning one of my distracting thoughts was how confusing this thing about awareness is - it’s one of those concepts that when we think about it more carefully our previous understanding is no longer so clear. So using just simple observation let’s have a go at spelling it out.

As I sit here now I am aware of everything around me. In actual fact this awareness is dependent on my five senses. I am aware of the sensory information being received through my eyes, ears, nose (and associated taste), and skin. Check this out for yourself to make sure I have got this right.

I am also aware of the interior of my body. I can feel my heart beating, my stomach feeling a little empty pre-breakfast, my guts and places of pressure such as the interior of my knee which is a bit painful. Check this out for yourself, (obviously not the knee bit).

I am also aware of what I call ‘myself’. Now this is tricky if I am going to be strict about reporting only what I am sensing in this moment. Not adding any additional concepts. So it is partly the sensation of my face - around the eyes, mouth and jaw - and more subtly a feeling of looking out through or from my face. Usually I would describe all these sensations bundled together as being aware of myself and what is around me - this is what is meant by subject (me) and object (everything else). Again check for yourself.

Now comes the difficult bit. If I am completely strict about observing my experience in this moment the things that I sense as me and everything else, are all sensations arising within awareness. Observation shows that there is actually only awareness and within this awareness sensations occur and some of these sensations I designate as ‘me’ and others as ‘everything else’. Check this out also. You may have to be quite strict here about simply observing because we are deeply caught in the habit of thinking that awareness is something that I possess, “my awareness”, like one of our internal organs, rather than the all-encompassing space in which the sensations that make up our feeling of being a separate self arise.

OK? Now the next bit.

If everything that I feel is me and everything around me, is most simply sensations arising within awareness, what is the nature of this awareness - for instance does it have an edge? Let’s go back to strict observation. Feeling into this awareness can I find an edge? I don’t think so - it seems to go on for ever or be everywhere. There is literally nothing that I can be aware of other than awareness itself. And is it created by something, does it have a beginning and an end? Again apparently not - based just on observation alone it is always there. Things come and go within it but it appears to remain stable and in itself unchanging.

Now most tricky of all. Does it exist? Well awareness is certainly present - how else could it know itself? But trying to locate it as a ‘thing’ with edges that is dependent on other things for its existence, is apparently impossible.

So what did you observe?

NW. 20 October 2023