Awareness of Awareness

Imagine blowing a bubble. It travels away from you, but then the wind shifts and it lands back on your body. Throughout its brief journey, the bubble remained in your field of awareness. This field is what is being investigated in nondual mindfulness. It's just on the surface and available to all.

Isn’t that just attention?

Attention is awareness directed at an object. It can only jump amongst the phenomena that appear in the field of awareness.

Now imagine the bubble pops and your attention moves to the part of your body where the bubble landed. Your focus shifted, but the body was already in the field of awareness.

Consider how staying focused requires effort. Awareness is effortless.

Ok, my brain generates this field of awareness allowing me to be conscious of the external world. So what?

The implications of what you’ve noticed may not be immediate. But they are very deep and liberating.

The world and the contents of your mind are in perpetual motion. Awareness is the only constant you have ever known. That intuitive sense of self which is common in every experience is based on the continuity and stability of awareness. But as awareness is not limited to your body, this self is not the sense of being a separate person, cut off from the world.

Being aware of awareness, we see that it is like space. The space occupied by my body cannot really be said to be different from the space occupied by yours, except in terms of location which itself is a concept based on space. If you can identify yourself as being a point in space, you are connected to all of space.

Why do insights on awareness seem to make metaphysical claims about reality?

As we explore awareness we find that it is quite undefinable. It is dimensionless and timeless. All experience appears in it, is known from it, and is made of it, yet never changes it. Science defines fields that are fundamental to the universe, but says nothing of consciousness. How can our description of reality be complete without an understanding of the field that is most fundamental to our being?

As an analogy, consider that all light is a fluctuation of electromagnetic fields which follow the same fundamental laws across the universe. Yet light appears to us in various colours and displays an amazing array of forms. When we look at something we are seeing light and shadow, rather than the thing itself. This analogy is not complete as electromagnetism is only one of the fundamental fields in physics and sight is just one of our senses. The field of awareness encompasses all possible experience.

However, nothing needs to be taken on faith. Nondual mindfulness is based on first person insight.

What do I need to do to experience nonduality?

What’s being pointed to is not an experience and is always present. Contemplate different nonduality pointers and see what language and style resonates with you.

“‘I am’ is ever afresh. You do not need to remember in order to be. As a matter of fact, before you can experience anything, there must be the sense of being. At present your being is mixed up with experiencing. All you need is to unravel being from the tangle of experiences. Once you have known pure being, without being this or that, you will discern it among experiences and you will no longer be misled by names and forms.”
Quote from ‘I am That’ by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj.

 

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