What Is Awareness?

Provisionally, we’ll say that awareness is that to which any objective experience (or object or arising) is appearing.

How Is This To be Experientially Established?

Explore the following: 

0. Does awareness exist? 

• For instance, can a thought (like “five”) appear on its own, or does it (necessarily) appear to “something”?
  • See that it appears to “something.”
  • Then see that this “something is not a thing (an object). 
  • This “something” is awareness.
  • So, awareness exists.

Then consider the viveka (discrimination) teaching in order to establish, in addition to the presence or existence of awareness, the metaphysical priority of awareness.

1a. Is it true that, e.g., thoughts are “the seen”?

1b. Is it true that awareness is the “seer”? 

1c. Can awareness, itself, be “seen”?

2a. Is it true that (e.g.) thoughts change? 

2b. Is it true that that which is aware of thoughts does not change?

3a. Is it true that thoughts are many? 

3b. Is it true that that which is aware of thoughts is indivisible and, as such, is one?

// Try to find parts inside of awareness itself.

4a. Is it true that thoughts, figuratively speaking, appear in the “foreground”? 

4b. Is it true that awareness resides in the “background”? 

• Check. See that–to take another example–hearing appears in the “foreground” while awareness (witnessing awareness) is in the “background.”

And here’s the nice “takeaway”: 

5a. Let a thought or feeling like “I am sad” or “I am alone” arise. 

5b. Check closely: When you stay only with the experience of being aware, does the experience of being aware itself experience hurt or harm?

See that it–witnessing awareness–does not experience harm or hurt. See that it never experiences aggressions, microaggressions and therefore doesn’t need safe spaces or trigger warnings, and so on.

What, Then, Is Suffering?

Suffering (dukkha) is the mixing of awareness with non-awareness, of awareness with objects, of the Self with the non-self.

• Any time there is mixing there is at once suffering.

What, Then, Is The First Remedy?

Again, viveka or discrimination. There is the “unmixing” of awareness from objects, the “disentangling” of awareness from objective experiences. 

• NB: This strategy vastly outstrips the Stoic dichotomy or trichotomy of control, as the latter assumes that one is a separate self who can achieve ataraxia, or freedom from mental disturbance. So long as that assumption is in place, so long shall there be samsara.

And So, The First Teaching In A Nutshell?

Awareness is not an object. Period.