Awareness: it's not what you know, it's how you know
Awareness is the destination, mind was the road to the destination. You can actually leap directly into the destination if you have the know how...and the guts.
Once you’ve gotten through the basics of understanding meditation, mind, and mindfulness, you can relax. Literally!
You 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 you get to relaxation within awareness that the results of meditation are truly “transformative”.
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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 or lose our gains. There is probably an important factor of neurological conditioning taking place within mindfulness practice that loses footing if it isn’t continuously maintained1.
Awareness is different, changes in it are more durable, and ultimately they don’t rely on our biology2. A traditional analogy is often used: in a dream, mindfulness changes the experience of a dream, but the dream continues. Awareness brings one out of the dream. Awareness is the main factor in waking up from the dream.
Awareness goes hand in hand with relaxation and insight. Usually relaxation comes first, and this triggers insight, which reveals awareness. But sometimes insight comes early, and makes relaxation much easier, which makes awareness accessible. They work together, and there is more than one way of approaching the process.
When awareness is activated through meditation, it expands. And many, many people report that it gets brighter and stronger with age, reducing or eliminating fear and anxiety, making life all the better.
This article is part of the Meditation 101: Six Ideas to Clarify Your Practice
Meditative relaxation does the heavy lifting
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 to relax when we need to, and a mind that maintains mindfulness can enjoy as much ordinary relaxation as it wants without problems.
But when relaxation encourages a drift into wandering mind, it is counterproductive to meditation. Why? Two reasons.
Wandering mind dismantles mindfulness, like being bedridden causes muscles and bones to atrophy.
Wandering mind does not lead to awareness.
Meditative relaxation is a new skill, not an old habit
Once we have invested time in developing mindfulness through meditation, we want to hold onto our gains. Mindfulness is power, but that power can only show itself when we use it for what it is best at doing: directing us away from distraction.
When the mind has been tamed and distraction diminishes, an opportunity opens up that is leveraged by some, but not all meditation traditions. The ones that leverage it are the awareness traditions, such as Zen, Mahamudra, and Dzogchen. They are powerful, but rely on our capacity to relax without falling into distraction and wandering mind.
Actually, we all have the capacity, if we develop it. So what we really need is to realize this capacity, turn it into ability.
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 approach is meditative relaxation. Sometimes this is called “effortless mindfulness” or more traditionally “mahamudra shamatha” or even “objectless shamatha.” Whatever they are called, they develop a type of relaxation which is eye-opening and new.
Meditative relaxation disentangles us from thought activity without pushing thoughts away, 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.
Usually meditative relaxation is built on 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 the ones just mentioned (Mahamudra, Zen, and Dzogchen meditation systems). It is the core initial training within our Finding Ground Meditation approach.
Awareness vs awareness vs awareness
In meditation traditions we talk about three types of awareness.
everyday awareness (sometimes this is called “domestic” or “ordinary” awareness)
meditative awareness (often called “mindful-awareness”)
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.
Everyday awareness
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.
This is similar to the way mindfulness based traditions think of mindfulness itself. Awareness traditions emphasize the knowing quality of mindfulness right from the beginning. In Tibetan, the two terms are often joined together as “mindful awareness” or trenshe.
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 takes over much of the work that was previously shouldered by the clutter of thinking mind.
Meditative awareness
Training this way opens a pathway through the traffic of mind and distraction, and this takes us through to a clearing beyond mind altogether: 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.
And it is a very quiet experience. When you are within awareness, the mind subsides.
The mind cannot see or detect awareness, so it may begin to react as if it has lost its identity. While abiding in awareness, the mind will have less ability to keep its tangents of distraction together. It’s stories will end quickly after they have begun. At times, this will almost incite a revolution, with the mind searching for where the sense of self has gone. This is the mind trying to put itself back together, to make everything continuous again, the way it imagines they always were (even though they weren’t).
Because of this, you may feel that the mind has increased its turmoil, and you can lose your footing within awareness and fall back into mind. This happens because you are lured back into the stories of the mind. On its own the mind can’t reach into awareness to find you — you are beyond its reach. But habits of always returning to the stormy ocean of mind kicks in, and this continually interrupts your early attempts to stay in awareness.
If you keep going, you’ll develop the strength of meditative relaxation and naturally ride the waves without falling in. It’s a great feeling, too. Within awareness you feel safe and sound. It’s like being invisible in a crowd, seeing everything but not being seen.
Awareness is an early milestone
When you begin to experience meditative awareness, you realize, once and for all, that the meditative journey is real.
Up until that point, this might seem like philosophy, or theory. You may be intrigued, but not yet convinced: maybe the hype around meditation is valid, but maybe not. You just don’t know yet.
That doubt persists until your meditation matures. When you experience meditative awareness our perspective changes, sometimes in a single session. But at least, after a few good sessions of meditative awareness you find yourself 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 you haven’t already seen these qualities come alive through meditation practice.
In a nutshell:
Mind is that part of you 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 you 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 profound statement is the backbone of awareness meditation traditions.
This capacity is where the third type of awareness begins: awakened awareness.
Awakened awareness
Awakened awareness is the natural unfolding of the self-knowing capacity. When this lamp turns on, transformation is unstoppable, 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-knowingness”. 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 of anything in their precious life. It is the most life-affirming experience of them all. 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.
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 and attention
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 is very different from mind, mindfulness, and attention
Awareness isn’t something we direct like a flashlight, it’s more like a bare light bulb illuminating everything around it. Think field of awareness rather than beam of awareness. All three types of awareness are like this, they are just increasingly potent and free from entanglement with the mind.
Unlike attention and mindfulness, which are faculties of our basic being, awareness is more subtle and pervasive.
If you stand outside your body and all its sensations, and your inner reaction to being outside, are all easy to locate as parts of you.
But the space around your body, and the vast space around the earth itself are part of the experience even if we don’t identify them as part of us. But they are: without the space around us, nothing else would be possible, the space is a fundamental necessity for anything else. That space is also, of course, pervading our bodies, even though we think of our bodies as existing within space. That is not just academic thinking either, it is true, and it really shows up in meditation.
Awareness is like that space within and all around us. It isn’t just “in” us, and it isn’t just “outside” us. It is the part of us that knows the fact of our existence, and yet can also know the contents of our experience. In the same way some people believe in a god that is everywhere and all knowing, you could make a case for awareness being that way.
You are reading with body and mind, knowing with awareness
As you read this, your mind interprets the written characters brought in through your eyeballs. Your mind also contemplates and tries to make sense of the meaning the words bring. Mindfulness sustains attention on reading so that you can get through the paragraph or the entire piece before being pulled away by something else. Mindfulness also connects the meaning of this paragraph with the other paragraphs above.
Eyeballs do the finding, the hunting, for stuff to process. Mind and mindfulness are the active processing components of reading.
Awareness sees all of this happening. It sees the activity of physical reading, the attempt to understand, the effort to stay mindful, and it witnesses the drawing of conclusions. But through all this it has not done a thing, or burned a single calorie. It is free from work or effort or doing. Awareness knows, which doesn’t take effort or energy.
All this stuff appearing in our lives are like reflections in a mirror. Awareness is the mirror itself. Awareness sees the reflections, but the reflections don’t see awareness. On top of that, awareness is aware of itself. The reflections in the mirror, the body and mind and all their operations, are not aware of themselves. They are known through awareness knowing them.
Reading, in our example, is a local activity of knowing plugged into the source itself: awareness. Without awareness there would be no reading. But without reading, there would still be awareness.
Awareness: see for yourself
This is why awareness is considered the reality underneath everything else. The mind, the body, all the components we’ve talked about, only seem to be alive and independent. They are all known by awareness, not by themselves. And when we are healthy, through meditation, awareness sees without fixating or clinging to the parts of the display. Awareness is free of clinging, free of the display itself. Awareness is the unchanging basis of their very existence.
And the important point of all this is that awareness can be the basis of meditation. That takes it from a philosophical idea (“awareness is the reality underneath everything”) into a direct personal experience that confirms itself. When you practice meditation according to awareness traditions, you enter into this experience yourself, and whatever you thought about it beforehand no longer matters. You see for yourself.
In the mahamudra tradition, awareness is understood to be a mixture of space and mind, and analogies to this effect pop up throughout the centuries of it’s texts.
Mahamudra instructions teach you to rest in the space of awareness, free from mind.
The first step in doing so is to learn to relax — relax in a meditative way, so that the contractions and seizures of thinking are able to unwind, and your sense of being, of knowing, can expand into its natural spaciousness.
Awareness is already there, ready for everything
We don’t develop awareness the way we develop 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.
An important traditional term for awareness relates to light: luminosity. Sometimes this is translated as clear light, or luminous clarity. As you can see, light keeps popping up, and this has to do with the role light plays in our experience of seeing things. It is a good analogy for that, but not really a direct description.
You can experience luminosity with the lights out.
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.
Just to be clear: luminosity does not mean a cool experience of lights, or rays of lights coming out of your eyes, or having exciting visions. Luminosity is not trippy, it is profound. It’s not about colors and energy, it’s about the nature of reality and the role awareness has in that nature.
In classical texts, luminosity does not refer to domestic awareness or meditative awareness, it refers to awakened awareness. When the world luminosity (Tibetan; ösel) shows up, you are dealing with deep dharma.
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.
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next up: the bigger context of our journey
This has probably been a lot to read. 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!
So far we’ve looked at meditation, mindfulness, mind, and awareness. There are two more topics in this series: path, and the role of a teacher. Next up will be the overall journey of meditation from just starting out to the deepest tranformative outcome. This is called the path.
Jeffrey
This article is part of the Meditation 101: Six Ideas to Clarify Your Practice
You can read the rest of the series by following these links:
I say probably simply because I don’t keep up on the year-by-year advances of science as it looks at meditation. There are so many good sources on the neurological effects of meditation that I’ll let you search them out if your interested. I’m not interested because not knowing this stuff never hindered my meditation or the meditation of anyone in history, and knowing it doesn’t seem to have made anyone’s meditation better. It may be interesting, but that may be all it is.
Tibetan meditation masters emphasize this, especially in discussions about dementia. If you stabilize within awareness before the onset of dementia, your awareness is not compromised, even if your mind, body, and mindfulness are. Is it true? They certainly think it is.