Warning It is neither perceived by the senses nor by the mind. It is not a “thing” in the usual sense. It has no identifiable location, shape, form, texture, color or weight. However, it is the eternal basis of everything we experience. Awareness is our basic nature, already and always. This is us. We must know and dwell in it to live out our full humanity.
It can be known only by direct experience. All others can do is point you to this experience. If you follow this guide, you will surely know when the moment is ripe. The experience of natural, unchanging, simple awareness is experiencing who you are and always have been. This notice has no purpose, intent, expectation or attachment. Only is.
It’s actually quite simple to experiment with. We are born into a pure and simple awareness. A young child naturally experiences one thing after another without interpretation or interpretation, without separation into ‘I’ and that.” Buddhists describe this with the metaphor of a complex tapestry. The young child enjoys a variety of sensory experiences and moves with pleasure from one visual impression to another.
However, this is no longer the case for us. We have lost the natural unfiltered awareness of a child. Instead, we embed memories, stories, and meanings in perceived images. We constantly interpret and comment on the tapestry. Instead of experiencing the tapestry, we transform it, instead experiencing it as a conceptual abstraction. And these mental processes are quickly removed from our brief but natural experience, leaving little time to experience what is really there.
There is no good or bad here, just an observation that unfiltered direct awareness is our natural state. The problem is not that we lose the ability to add meaning and context, but that we forget and lose the ability to experience things directly. as it is. We gain meaning, context, and perhaps functionality by adding to existing patterns of perception, but we lose creativity, freshness, and opportunities for innovative thinking.
How does this happen? In early childhood we lose touch with unfiltered awareness. As we develop a sense of personal identity, it disappears. We are given a name, and then we fill that container with life experiences that, over time, form fixed patterns of perception—patterns through which we see the world. Our world is becoming narrower, familiar, fixed and increasingly abstract. Ordinary awareness goes underground as we develop conditioned, selective and preferential awareness.
The tree is no longer a simple sensory experience. It is a specific type of tree with specific characteristics, uses and preferences. The other person is no longer unknown to experience and discovery, but is quickly categorized – liked or disliked. Nothing remains as it is. We create a fantasy world where we no longer experience life as it is, but as we have made it out of our conditioned thinking. So our adult lives are bounded and limited by the past. Seven billion people on our planet and seven billion in the world.
I would like to pause here and offer the words of TS Eliot:
We will not stop searching
And the end of all our research
It will come back to where we started
And know the first place.
In this poem, he offers us a more specific instruction:
To reach for what you are not
You have to cross a path that you are not on.
What do they tell us? First, what the seeker seeks is what we have always been from the beginning, before the process of individuation and separation. Our journey, the end of our search, is the return home. Achieving this return requires awareness of the individual process, its assets and liabilities. We begin with the fragmentation of our personal self, which still holds a fragile, longing reminder of our natural essence, our wholeness. We become humble pilgrims following a path that leads back home to where we began.
Our insidious individual responsibility is our conditioning—the perceptual and reactive habits that unknowingly shape and influence all our experiences. We learn to acknowledge their presence with neutrality and detachment. We then allow these ghosts of the past to dissipate due to lack of further interest or development. The past, we observe, is only a mental pattern set so long ago that its significance, if any, has long passed. So what is it like to experience natural, unconditional awareness that is free from the past?
Consider the following. When you first wake up in the morning, notice what enters your visual or auditory field. It has not yet been named, appreciated, or in any way altered from its actual presentation to consciousness. This is simple unconditioned awareness of a sensitive object. When immersed in meditation, you can similarly observe mental activity without adding mental commentary. This is the unconditioned awareness of the mental object. It may only last a moment before you receive your usual conditional notification. Follow this as well, because it is important that you know the whole process – how an unfiltered alert is reactivated as a conditional alert.
Why is this view of unfiltered awareness so important? This is the beginning of a new freedom, or maybe I should say an old freedom. We now have the choice to experience and respond to how things really are rather than experiencing and responding to ourselves and the world shaped by our past. We are able to observe and observe our own mental processes and act on known influences.
The final step occurs when our focus shifts to awareness itself. We become self-conscious, not object-conscious. Unlike our child know our unconditioned awareness for the first time, as well as our conditioning. We know that mental and emotional objects appear in consciousness—we recognize everything that arises in awareness—but we know that they are only temporary manifestations in unchanging awareness. Our natural awareness, the ground of our existence, does not come and go. It is always now and always present.
Challenges and difficult conditions will continue. But they will be experienced with steadfast and flawless awareness. They are kept in an atmosphere of calmness, peace, wisdom and gentleness. There is no fear. No worries. No pain. Just presence and being. Some say it is a passive state incompatible with worldly life. This is not so. This is just an ego statement taken in ordinary life. Those who do it the most know better.
When action is necessary, it arises spontaneously from the clear knowing of unconditional awareness. This action will not be a response to our interpretation of the event, but a precise and accurate response to the experience at hand. There is no thought process, just knowing and responding naturally. We gradually gain confidence and trust in living from this center of our being. And we are inspired to know that those great people, as well as ordinary people who lived their lives with heart and soul, are remembered for their eternal services to humanity.
We also learn that this simple awareness is a great healing elixir. Mental and emotional manifestations, which once seemed separate from consciousness, are recognized as dynamic expressions of consciousness – formlessness, and constitute every expression of consciousness. No more separation. No more distractions. Finally, the recognition of oneness, oneness, holy union. We return home and know it for the first time.
In the Western tradition, the wise Oracle of Delphi puts it this way:
After you have touched it
There is no distribution:
He did not break his heart
Because it knows no separation.
Website: http://www.elliottdacher.org
