Pure awareness is not the same as regular old consciousness.
When science uses the term consciousness, it refers to the simple biological awareness of one’s own existence, the ability of our mind to interpret the world through sensation, thoughts, and perception. But when spirituality uses the term consciousness, it refers to pure awareness, an experience that precedes, transcends, and permeates all knowledge and experiences acquired through simple awareness. It refers to the state of being aware of awareness itself.
A jolting sneak peek of this state is what Rupert Spira’s question “Am I aware right now?” gives us, where the mind is startled into silence to recognize the ever-present awareness. Ironically, once the novelty of the shocking reveal wears off, the mind faces the same question from the next time onward with an anticipatory prejudice that renders this mystical exercise paradoxical.
“The timeless moments are free of resistance and seeking, during which our true nature of awareness is no longer obscured by the dualizing mind. When the mind returns it says, ‘Oh, that was awareness’, and off it goes in search of it.”
Rupert Spira
The tangible mercury bead called Awareness shatters into a thousand pieces when the spirited mind tries to seize it between its fingers. After all, that is what the mind does – direct its attention towards an object to preserve its separate self in duality as “I” versus “the rest of the world”. That is the only way for the mind to prevail for all social and pragmatic purposes. It brought itself into existence through gradual conditioning and methodical accumulation of thoughts, feelings, sensations, and perceptions from the first time we held up our hand as a baby, wiggled our fingers, and realized, “Hey, this is mine”. It is not going to give itself up so easily at the first taste of Awareness.
But the mind can never know Awareness, at least not in the way it knows all the other objective experiences. This catch-22 is beautifully explained in Spira’s analogy about the dreamer’s mind and the character in her dream from whose point of view the dreamed world is known –
“Everything the dreamed character knows is a reflection of the limitations of her own mind, and therefore she cannot know the dreamer’s ‘unlimited’ mind although her own mind is made of it. For the same reason, the finite mind can never know unlimited awareness, for the mind is a limitation of the very awareness for which it is in search.”
Rupert Spira
Any effort the mind can make to find or know Awareness is only going to add layers to further veil the hidden obvious. What might help is the methodical disassembling of this pseudo entity to release the death grip it has on itself. We have to see the mind for what it really is, to be more precise, what it is not, for the veil to be drawn back and Awareness to shine through.
“The finite mind or separate self is an illusion that is seemingly real only from its own illusory perspective. However, this does not mean that the finite mind or separate self does not exist. It simply means that it is not what it appears to be.”
Rupert Spira
Cont.
