awareness

Now that we’ve gotten through the basics of meditation, mind, and mindfulness, we can relax. Literally!

We can relax because it’s finally time to explore the topic of awareness, and awareness goes hand-in-hand with relaxation. It isn’t until we get to relaxation within awareness that the results of meditation are worth calling “transformative”.

Mindfulness on its own doesn’t reach as far: it enables many changes, but those same changes revert if we don’t keep our mindfulness strong. It’s like physical exercise, we have to keep it up, and the older we are, the more work this takes.

Awareness is different, changes in it are more durable, and are often considered actual transformations. Awareness seems to grow and permeate on its own. Once it is activated through insight, it expands. And many people find that it gets brighter and stronger with age.

meditative relaxation does the work

Relaxation is the key to awareness. A busy mind, a racing mind, races in the opposite direction to awareness. Relaxation, on the other hand, is a pathway into awareness.

But what kind of relaxation?

Ordinary everyday relaxation won’t get us there. Ordinary relaxation, as wonderful as it is, doesn’t foster awareness. Ordinary relaxation is what we could call physical relaxation, sometimes with a touch of letting our mind drift pleasantly. Relaxing our mind in this way has more to do with dropping our guard, or letting our discipline take a break. Rather than leading to the discovery of awareness, this reflects a disengagement of mindfulness.

It’s kind of funny if you think about it: not only does ordinary relaxation not deepen our meditation, but it also can weaken the mindfulness we worked so hard to develop.

Now I don’t mean any disrespect to ordinary relaxation. It is wonderful, and a mind that maintains mindfulness can enjoy as much ordinary relaxation as it can muster.

But when relaxation encourages a drift into wandering mind, it is counterproductive in meditation. Why? because a wandering mind will not lead us to awareness.

And this means we need to learn a new approach, a way of relaxing that lifts us away from the turmoil of the mind altogether.

That is where meditative relaxation comes in.

In short, meditative relaxation is a way of disentangling ourselves from thought activity without pushing thoughts away or controlling them or doing anything aggressive — or even assertive. It is like waking up from a dream, not like climbing out of quicksand. It is a skill, and once learned, it makes meditation potent.

Meditative relaxation is usually built upon a foundation of mindfulness. It is possible to begin it before training mindfulness, but it can remain elusive for far longer without the stability of mindfulness backing us.

If you learn the elements of mindfulness first, awareness becomes a natural next step — and what a big, bold step that proves to be.

Meditative relaxation is the major point of awareness-based traditions, such as Mahamudra, Zen, and Dzogchen meditation systems. It is the core initial training within the Finding Ground Home Retreats, (click here to learn more about those).

As you know, meditation is a method, something to do, and though it’s fun to read about it, reading won’t give you the experience.

On to awareness.

awareness vs awareness vs awareness

In meditation tradition, we talk about three types of awareness.

1. everyday awareness (sometimes this is called “domestic” or “ordinary” awareness)
2. meditative awareness (often called “mindful-awareness”)
3. awakened awareness (also known as “empty awareness”). We’ll talk about this last one another time, because it’s a big topic. We have enough on our plate already.

For meditation to be truly transformative, it has to aim itself toward the realm of awareness, which means navigating the layers of thinking and confusion. To make this possible, we begin by developing mind and mindfulness through the initial stages of meditation. These involve a double handful of everyday awareness: the part of us that knows what we’re doing at any given point.

The more everyday awareness we have, the simpler our state of mind becomes. And by simpler, we also mean cleaner and clearer. A simple mind is uncluttered, and awareness assumes much of the work that was previously shouldered by the clutter of thinking mind.

That training opens a pathway through the woods, and from there we venture through to the clearing beyond confusion: this is where we discover meditative awareness.

Meditative awareness is a platform of experience within ourselves where we can view the workings of our mind without being pulled into it. Awareness itself does not create a dialogue within itself like mind does. It is like a clear sky, pervaded by light. I

And it is a very quiet experience. When we are within awareness, the mind subsides. The mind cannot see or detect awareness, so it doesn’t try to pull us back within its activity. We can and will lose our footing within awareness and fall back into mind, but mind doesn’t reach into awareness to find us. While we are within mind we feel safe and sound. It’s like being invisible in a crowd, seeing everything but not being seen.

Another useful analogy: it’s like one moment we are driving a car (driver = mind), and the next moment we are in the backseat while the driver is still driving (backseat perspective = awareness). Awareness sees mind, but mind doesn’t see awareness.

When you begin to experience meditative awareness, you realize, once and for all, that the meditative journey is real, and you take a stronger interest in what else you can learn.

Up until that point, this might all seem like a bunch of philosophy, or a bunch of theory. We may be intrigued, but we aren’t yet convinced: maybe they hype around meditation is valid, but maybe not. We just don’t know yet.

Until our meditation matures. Then we experience meditative awareness and our perspective is forever changed. A few good sessions of meditative awareness gets you excited about the possibilities, and usually makes you appreciate the teachers and traditions you learned all this from. We all do an about-face when we glimpse awareness!

awareness, simplified

All this talk of awareness vs mind vs mindfulness gets muddled quickly if we haven’t already seen these qualities come alive through meditation practice.

In a nutshell: mind is that part of us that engages through directed attention with one thing at a time. It uses thinking (also called conceptuality) to isolate an object or task and analyze it. Mindfulness stabilizes the environment of the mind so that this analysis and directed attention proceeds without disruption.

Awareness is the general knowingness of our experience. It is not conceptual, it has no relationship to thinking. It is both aware of the mind (and body) but also aware of itself.

Awareness is the part of us that knows whether there is something to know (such as an object: a cat, a hat, a bat) or nothing to know. In other words, awareness can know something, but it continues to know even if there is nothing other than itself to know.

And that is where the possibilities open up: awareness can know itself. This is a profound statement, and it is the backbone of great meditation traditions. This capacity is where the third type of awareness begins: awakened awareness.

Awakened awareness is the natural unfolding of the self-knowing capacity. This is where transformation is undeniable, and it is getting to this experience that takes up the bulk of our early training.

The capacity for awareness to know itself in isolation is known in Tibetan as rangrik, or “self-knowing”. Some translators render this as “reflexive awareness” or “self-cognizance”. It is way beyond our everyday notion of “self-awareness,” which means one has a general sense of who they are and their role in the world. This common self-awareness is a much shallower quality, albeit an important one.

Self-knowing awareness is a deeper, more intimate experience than the already inspiring experience of meditative awareness. And intimate is a very good word for this. The experience of awakened awareness, self-knowing awareness, is probably the most intimate experience a person can have. It is the most life-affirming experience a person can have. It touches something within us, and we see that that innermost part of us is good, very good. The traditions call this intimate realm of our awareness buddha nature, our innate capacity for immeasurable wisdom and freedom.

awareness vs mind

We now have mind, mindfulness, and awareness. They aren’t the same, but of course they are tightly related. We finally sort them out by practicing meditation, but we have to learn them as ideas first, and that’s what we’re doing here.

Mindfulness is a faculty of the mind. If the mind were a hand, mindfulness would be a finger. Other faculties would be other fingers: attention, intention, love, anger, equanimity. They are listed and described in the traditional literature of buddhist meditation. Awareness is not a faculty of mind. It is pre-mind, which means that the mind happens against the backdrop of awareness. If mind were a hand, awareness would be the space around the hand, the environment that makes a hand possible.

Mindfulness is closely related to the faculty of attention. It is a hands-on faculty of the mind. We direct attention. We pay attention to something specific, such as our breath, or the keys of a piano.

Attention is like a flashlight beam that is pointed specifically at an object. Mindfulness is the scaffolding that helps and holds the beam of attention so we can examine and understand what we are illuminating.

Awareness isn’t something we direct like a flashlight, it’s more like a bare light bulb that illuminates everything without bias. Think field of awareness rather than beam of awareness. And in that way, it is different from mindfulness. All three types of awareness are like this, they are just increasingly potent and free from entanglement with the mind.

awareness pervades everything

Unlike attention and mindfulness, awareness is not a faculty. It is a basic fact of existence. We don’t develop awareness the way we do mindfulness or attention. We uncover it. Awareness is there whether we recognize it or not. Awareness pervades all experiences of any kind. It is the light by which we know things — it is even present when we dream.

In classical texts, awareness is likened to the light of the sun pervading space, illuminating everything without bias. Awareness doesn’t judge or evaluate, it just shines, and this “shining” is the equivalent to knowing.

A traditional term for awareness plays off the image of light: luminosity. Awareness is the luminosity of experience, the capacity to know and understand. Some books substitute the word luminosity for awareness, so it is worth knowing this is what they mean. Luminosity can have deeper, richer connotations, but they are all related to the fundamental quality of awareness. In most classical texts, luminosity does not refer to domestic awareness or meditative awareness, it refers to awakened awareness.

As we have seen, mind is the part of us that knows something else, and it depends on the light of awareness to be able to know. Mind plugs itself into the knowing capacity of awareness, and then uses that borrowed ability to know things in particular.

two examples: mind vs awareness vs mindfulness

For example: mind knows the newspaper, but awareness just knows its own being. If mind were to be unplugged from awareness, our eyes would just stare uncomprehendingly at the paper. Because mind is not plugged in to awareness, the newspaper doesn’t even register.

Or, imagine the screen onto which a film is projected. Without the screen, the projector would throw a stream of colored light into empty space; nothing would catch it and we wouldn’t see the picture. But with the screen, we are able to see the dancing images of light. In this context awareness is the screen, the backdrop of mind. Mind is the collection of colored light.

And mindfulness? It is our ability to pay attention to aspects of the dancing images. Mindfulness focuses and integrates the experience of the dancing images, and keeps us attending to the screen. Without mindfulness, we might look at our shoes instead. Mindfulness is what remembers to look at the screen.

Another day, another big word tackled. Good job!

next up: the bigger context of our journey

This has been a lot, I understand that. Students are always amazed at how deep these simple terms are. There is no shame in giving it another read, or checking other articles that go into this same topic. But if you do, just remember that this has been a presentation from the awareness-based traditions of buddhist meditation, such as mahamudra, dzogchen, zen, and buddha nature traditions. Other traditions may talk about awareness in a slightly different way.

There are more books and articles on this than you could fit into a lifetime of reading, so don’t try to tackle them all!

Tomorrow we’ll go into a different part of the meditation experience: rather than talking about the inner workings of meditation, we’ll talk about the overall journey, which is called the path.

See you tomorrow!

Jeffrey