What Is Awareness ?

[Bruno]

What exactly is Awareness ? I wanna attempt to define awareness as clear as possible.

How does it feel ? How raised awareness feels different from low awareness ? Awareness is more like a laser that is pointed to a specific thing or more like a fire that can be raised to lighten the whole place ? What exactly are the most important things that need to be seen through the light of awareness ? In which specific ways can I raise my awareness, along with meditation ?

PS : Awareness, Consciousness, Observation.. All the same.

[Bruno]

@Leo Gura I would like to know your point of view if possible.

I got inspired by your last video about awareness. (:

Edited June 28, 2016 by Bruno

[Toby]

"What Is Awareness?" is actually a really good question for self-inquiry.

[Natasha]

@Bruno Did you watch this one of Leo's? 

 

[30secs]

as far as I know Awareness is in the moment observation

[Bruno]

@Natasha Yeah I did, but it left me a little confused.

@Toby That's a good idea, I'm going to meditate using that today.

@30secs Observation of what ?

[key]

Awareness is exactly what you're experiencing, there is no human identity, no puppeteer, no you, connect with now.

The human mind is extremely complex, raising your awareness is more like removing the trash from your mind, there's only your attachment to fantasies preventing you from seeing.

 

[Mal]

@Bruno @Bruno

Awareness is a concept. 

Clinging to the concept prevents awareness becoming apparent.

[Bruno]

@Mal I'm not trying to create a concept, I understand that concepts are worth nothing without experiencial reference. But I want some guidelines, to help me find the experiencial "substance".

I want the wisdom and the experience of someone greater in awareness than me, put into words, so that I know what to look for.

I like the idea of seeing the difference between awareness and thinking, but now I wanna understand more about awareness itself, and more than that, I wanna understand the process of using awareness to correct the dysfunctions and neurosis of the mind.

@Kenya I'm not interested in enlightenment right now.

"raising your awareness is more like removing the trash from your mind" can you describe that process to me ?

@Piotr I see what you mean, but suppose that I have never in my life payed attention to how the air feels on my face, and then someone tells me "Hey, try to feel the air on your face." then my awareness will be directed towards trying to feel the air on my face, and I will finally be able to feel it, which is what really matters.

[Mal]

@Bruno

Hi Bruno,

With all due respect you're pretending that you can know something like awareness can be packaged into a nice neat verbal lesson to take away and think about.

You're also pretending there is such a thing as personal growth, then some event called enlightenment.  None of this is true. 

However if you do relax into life as it is you will find that:

Awareness is "this".  Everything arising is awareness.  There is no difference between good thoughts and bad thoughts, awareness and unawareness. Up and down left and right. 

This might be frustrating for you right now, especially as you're one of the many people who are currently buying into the notion that you can actually do anything to become aware. 

I just gave you the only guide you need. You just passed it by because you think that you need to do something, you imagine that awareness can be achieved somehow by us giving you some special pointer. 

You are asking where to look for awareness. That in itself is stopping awareness from doing its magic. 

Don't worry. You're not alone. Don't all people chase something to their grave and never find it? That's because it's already here. Drop the idea that there is such a 'thing' as awareness. Because there isn't.

When you stop looking the neurosis corrects itself. The very definition of neurosis is trying to find something that already is. 

 

[Salaam]

@Bruno

I get it man, you want context, to help you direct you towards what to focus on. That's what the mind does, besides it's constant narrating, it works to organize, orient, and direct.

Awareness is a lot of things, it's an ability, skill, and system that works in concert with other systems within who you are.

Awareness develops with sensitivity and differentiation, being able to feel and distinguish between ever more subtle and nuanced things. Feeling not just the air across your skin, but it's temperature and weight, thickness, moisture content, speed, and it's spiraling patterns of movement. The difference between seeing blue and seeing 100 different alternating shades of blue, which is really alternating shapes or wave-forms of light, within a particular threshold that our brain recognizes as "blue".

Doing the above affords us greater access to then being aware of how these minute, subtle things interact or contrast with each other. And then being aware of those contrasts, opens the way for a deeper awareness for even more subtle things underneath, those layer of contrasts. For example, I can feel the air coming in and out of my body, which everyone can reasonably feel, but I am also feeling the contrast or inter-relation of that air with the pressure differentials in my blood, which also contrasts with the speed or pacing of the blood circulation in my body, and how that impacts the respiration of the mitochondria of my cells, and the waste build-up that comes when they "breathe" too laboriously.

So, via extension of my awareness through this connective chain of contrast or inter-relation, I am aware of not just my breathing, but the cumulative breathing of my cells. While I can not isolate specific cells just yet, I have enough sensitivity to differentiate threshold ranges, by how things change when those thresholds are crossed.

Awareness allows us to experience and recognize movement, change, structure, and how different structures or shapes, move and change, in relation or contrast to each other.

Awareness also develops via multi-dimensionality, or in other words being able to hold multiple kinds of movement within your awareness at once. For instance, I have worked very long to become sensitive to the feeling of electromagnetism or attraction and repulsion and I feel those sensations as a whole different set of feelings and sensations, that I experience at the same time, or in parallel with normal emotions, and thought.

Another example for multidimensionality is found via potentiality. Most people can only focus on and also attach to one potentiality at a time. Like "I was talking to dude and X happened, which made me feel Y", when people who have trained and populated their awareness of potentiality could be like "I was talking to dude and X happened, which made me feel Y, but also if I look at it this way I feel A, and this way W, and this way M".

Now another thing Awareness depends on for development is speed of perception. I have worked a long time to be able to understand, differentiate, and expand upon very subtle things that occur within a fraction of a second. So for me, that whole "but also if I look at it this way I feel A, and this way W, and this way M" happens at the same time I felt "Y". I've had moments just this weekend, where I was able to feel and act on 8 different potentialities all at the same time, in response to a single contrast. And that's an amazing and very empowering ability to have, because it compounds the emotional range and depth, I have available to me in response to life. I am not bound to a single, limited response, but can balance and counter-balance how I choose to express and respond.

It's a similar thing with feelings as well. Where people feel happy or sad, or whatever single word, I feel bundles of emotions for that very same experience. I disarmed depression and surrender type ways of relating many years ago, by being able to feel and differentiate how despair/surrender tricks our feelings to accept it/internalize it, by bundling with comfort. This phenomenon is analogous to how people talk about dying from cold exposure involves feelings of wanting comfort and "letting go", as if that is the solution to being so tired and drained, when really it is the opposite.

Hopefully this helps you out a bit. I know it can be frustrating getting dogmatic responses in lieu of actual real-world experience and success. But, really they're just doing the best they can with what they are currently capable of. 

Oh and speaking of that, awareness of what you don't know is hugely important. Balancing Potentiality with Mystery and Ignorance so you protect yourself from all the negative effects that come from delusional or ungrounded certainty. If you are so certain, you lose sight of all potentiality, you pre-limit yourself from updating and expanding previously held beliefs. Closing yourself off into an internal echo-chamber is not a good recipe for expanding your awareness out into the realm of things you're currently blind to.
 

[Bruno]

@Salaam just... Thank you man. This was very helpful, I appreciate it.

What do you think about this; The process of raising one's awareness is composed of two parts. One part is to train the skill of awareness, which is obtained through the practice of using awareness, and this can be trained using meditation. The other part is to see things that I was once blind to, using awareness, which then allows me to go deeper and search for more and more. This part takes an open mind, to question and to be willing to see new ways and perspectives, it takes the willingness to look and investigate into places never questioned before.

[Bruno]

4 hours ago, Salaam said:

I disarmed depression and surrender type ways of relating many years ago, by being able to feel and differentiate how despair/surrender tricks our feelings to accept it/internalize it, by bundling with comfort.

I find this very helpful, because that is what I am really interested in. In developing awareness to dissect and melt away neurotic behaviors.

[Teags]

14 hours ago, Mal said:

@Bruno

Hi Bruno,

With all due respect you're pretending that you can know something like awareness can be packaged into a nice neat verbal lesson to take away and think about.

You're also pretending there is such a thing as personal growth, then some event called enlightenment.  None of this is true. 

However if you do relax into life as it is you will find that:

Awareness is "this".  Everything arising is awareness.  There is no difference between good thoughts and bad thoughts, awareness and unawareness. Up and down left and right. 

This might be frustrating for you right now, especially as you're one of the many people who are currently buying into the notion that you can actually do anything to become aware. 

I just gave you the only guide you need. You just passed it by because you think that you need to do something, you imagine that awareness can be achieved somehow by us giving you some special pointer. 

You are asking where to look for awareness. That in itself is stopping awareness from doing its magic. 

Don't worry. You're not alone. Don't all people chase something to their grave and never find it? That's because it's already here. Drop the idea that there is such a 'thing' as awareness. Because there isn't.

When you stop looking the neurosis corrects itself. The very definition of neurosis is trying to find something that already is. 

 

@Mal I see a few posts on here saying similar things to what you are saying and I am trying to understand. Do you not think it's beneficial to try and understand awareness? Are you saying that we may aswell not bother doing this work in attempt to raise it? if we didn't learn about and practise mindfulness/awareness would it even be possible to just "be"? I only ask because you clearly understand this more than I, and I'm interested to see your opinion on my questions I asked. 

[Mal]

@Teags

Hi Teags,

You came here looking for answers, like all of us.  Because there may be some dissatisfaction in us and deep down we know that something isn't right and that materialism doesn't seem to really improve our situation. So, yes this is good, but that's where it ends.  As far as awareness is concerendd of course, try to understand it. That's all we can do is try. But it's ultimately a path that leads to nowhere, because the person can never understand awareness. Awareness is an energetic shift when the person and it's concepts collapse and all there is left is awareness.

There is a cliché: You won't know what a strawberry tastes like until you have tasted a strawberry.  Asking to define awareness is akin to asking somebody what a stawberry tastes like, pointless. But that's the life of the human being, to strive for things that it will never get.

Neurosis does not go away while the identity is present.  The identity IS neurosis, a contraction against reality, a delusion of a subject and object dichotomy.

So, is it not better to just eat the stawberry instead of think about the stawberry?

Mal

Edited June 29, 2016 by Mal

[Heart of Space]

Awareness is a skin tight aware nothing that's wrapped around and takes form as your perceptions.  Weird right?  Look for yourself.

Awareness is so magical.  If you want to see this just ask yourself how you're perceiving your perceptions.  Naturally you want to think that it works like: 

Perception------------>Perceiver

But really it's just:

Perception

Edited June 29, 2016 by Heart of Space

[cetus]

@Bruno Hea Bruno, I'll throw my 2 cents in for all it's worth. I think of pure awareness as being total emptiness. As in awareness that exists beyond the ever filtering and selective mind. Think of the mind as being like a pair of sunglasses for filtering effect from reality. Our brain can't process all the information that awareness brings in so most of it gets dumped into the sub-conscious by the filtering mind. Also when we relate to ourselves as the person doing the seeing, we add personal filters on top of the existing filters of the mind. It's sometimes said that if you dump the mind completely, that all that remains is empty awareness. Like unlimited free space. So I suggest that awareness is complete emptiness of mind. When it comes to the exact definition of awareness, that's kind of a great mystery. Sometimes it's said that it is awareness or consciousness that brings this material world into existence. But that's a whole different story. I hope this helps a little.

[Salaam]

On June 29, 2016 at 9:20 PM, Bruno said:

@Salaam just... Thank you man. This was very helpful, I appreciate it.

What do you think about this; The process of raising one's awareness is composed of two parts. One part is to train the skill of awareness, which is obtained through the practice of using awareness, and this can be trained using meditation. The other part is to see things that I was once blind to, using awareness, which then allows me to go deeper and search for more and more. This part takes an open mind, to question and to be willing to see new ways and perspectives, it takes the willingness to look and investigate into places never questioned before.

Nice man, it's a good start. I like how you put it in your own words, creating a kind of foundation for yourself. And now that you have a base you refine and expand/populate it with detail and patterns of interaction. All the while questioning it, testing it, so that you have a balanced view that is also open to further potential. 

Like for instance I would write "composed of two parts" as "composed of 2/? Parts". Or "two parts that I currently know of". Exposing my awareness to the tension and pressure of not being aware of more, counterbalancing the feeling of comfort that would come from concluding that this is the only potential available. 

This training or evolving of awareness is a physical, mental, emotional, and character based struggle. It plays out on all fronts and it's easy to shrug off or mistreat things so subtle that, our natural inclination misses out on informing us of their preciousness. 

We have only evolved so far and have a long road still ahead. 

So as far as expansion, lines to follow would be exposing your awareness to how those different fronts mentioned above all interact and depend on each other to develop awareness. How do they work together to foster an environment of balanced growth and synergy?

On June 29, 2016 at 9:23 PM, Bruno said:

I find this very helpful, because that is what I am really interested in. In developing awareness to dissect and melt away neurotic behaviors.

 I feel you man, I've changed in so many amazing ways and while I still have new challenges, the shit that used to make my life hell is behind me.

But, what seems to happen is what you see as things "to dissect and melt away" become parts of yourself you shelter and take responsibility for. So you become stronger through care, relating with your flaws or challenges, understanding them, calming down, empathizing and becoming a little less hostile (but still ferocious if warranted), gaining flexibility, and expanded capability with the more expansive perspective. 

For example, there is a side of us that wants to be god-like or invincible, powerful, where everything comes easy. There is another side of us that is fragile and weak and all the most horrible, cringing feelings, associate with it. Both sides are limited, but both sides counter-balance each other. But at first it's impossible to even understand and experience how they inter-relate without going through the process of sensitizing to their specific patterns and THAT doesn't happen when we are relating to them as things to be dissected and melted away. 

Its all good though. Things often start intellectually or analytically like that, but deeper into the process the rapport eventually shifts, and adds the other fronts mentioned before to our core motivations and direction. 

Or perhaps a better example would be with the comfort, surrender, and depression thing. I worked through my relationship with comfort which has a connection to that "wanting to be invincible or have everything easy" side actually, while also working my awareness through the "this is too hard I should give up" side of despair. Learning how they inter-relate and which of their flavors of chemistry work most in my favor and most against it. Coalescing into this result of no longer having close associations with depression/despair/surrender patterns of reaction and behavior. They're not a part of or within my range of reality right now. 

Edited June 30, 2016 by Salaam

[Leo Gura]

Sit down and be aware. Words will not help you here. They will only confuse you.

You need to just sit and struggle to be aware and see what happens.

You will not get a short-cut to the "answer" by asking others. That misses the point.

[Salaam]

9 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

Sit down and be aware. Words will not help you here. They will only confuse you.

You need to just sit and struggle to be aware and see what happens.

You will not get a short-cut to the "answer" by asking others. That misses the point.

Meh, that's kind of dogmatic. You might want to ease that stance a little, so you don't miss out on nuance. I'm assuming that was just an off-the-cuff response?

Yes, when it comes to sharing information there are limits, in a lot of ways  we can only be a reference for each other in that respect. Definitions without self-referential experience to connect to, won't have much practical application as it is, but in this case the definition, in and of itself isn't the problem. The issue lies in what action people choose in response.

There is a difference between using another as a reference or answer that replaces or substitutes the transfer of understanding that comes with involvement and experience, versus using another as a reference for gaining perspective on how to enhance and enrich the developmental process in concert with an actual practice. It's helpful to have some one point out structures behind the mind, that over time they can work to sensitize themselves to. And just as precious, is sharing structures of accountability and self-balancing that protects the integrity of continued development.

I assume that's what you attempt with your videos in a way?



Anyways, speaking of limitations or barriers, Bruno, it is also very important to work on becoming aware of limitation and learning from it. Gaining nuance with your own personal, dynamic, context-sensitive, "ceiling and floor". Some people feel limitation and respond with frustration, despair, anger, but it can also be precious, and enlightening (I don't mean no-self enlightenment here, I mean clarity). For instance my internal awareness is so deep and sensitive, that I can pick up on very fragile things going on inside my body. However, placing my awareness directly on those things, causes damage, making me sick. Why? It's because awareness in and of itself has a weight to it, like how you can feel the weight of a person's eyes/gaze on you even with your eyes closed. That weight can disrupt or distort the integrity of those fragile things structures and patterns of movement. 

So, with that experience we learn that even awareness has limitations, but those limitations don't necessarily mean loss, but instead an opportunity for trust and synergy with another part of who we are. Instead of trying to be directly aware in isolation, I mediate the weight of my awareness, through multi-dimensionality and contrast. Connecting with the larger structure they're a part of and gaining deeper understanding indirectly, from the inter-relations going on within that structure.

Actually here is a video that better describes the patterns and structures inherent to seemingly invisible things, that are made visible via contrast. Contrast in this case, being the use of salt or sand to create a chain of inter-relation with the vibrational frequencies to make visible, what we could  not directly perceive in isolation. Much like dusting for prints, it is the synergy and contrast of the dust and skin-oil that affords us the opportunity to be more aware. In a similar way, this is how I learned and gained capability with 12/? of the invisible structures I balance at all times that work behind and in concert with "thinking". Relating with how they all work and depend on each other, provides me an inexhaustible supply of growth experiences that changes and develops as I change and develop, creating momentum of synergy.

See, it is experiencing these kinds of realities first-hand which make me shake my head at people who dismiss difference and contrast. People who say that all there is, is nothingness or everything is an illusion. That's a fucking ignorant and irresponsible stance. Even the void has a purpose and creates contrast when it inter-relates with everything else. It's a dielectric material. 

The universe is filled with different patterns of motion and shape and they all interact and have different chemistries with each other. For instance, notice how in the video the higher the frequency the greater the complexity of shape, but also how that complexity impacts uniformity. Notice where the the thickest lines are, how the rising and falling of motion affects the activity of the salt and the porousness of shape. Which area's have the highest zones of activity and which don't.

There are principles of reality and nature and working with ourselves right there for people to understand, if we take the time to feel out how these interactions work together and inter-relate. Everything has a shape or pattern, even thoughts. Each thought also has a patterned chemical cascade, which plays a part in supporting it's integrity of shape and fidelity of expression. 

Why lose out on all that beautiful nuance and detail with an extreme or ignorant stance?

I hope this helps.

 

Edited June 30, 2016 by Salaam