The Experience of Being Aware
The One Light That Shines in All Minds (The Nature of Consciousness #11)
What is the actual experience of being aware? In earlier chapters we explored how attention habitually moves towards objects, thoughts, sensations, perceptions, and how, through self-enquiry, this movement can relax and return to its source. Here the enquiry becomes more intimate. What does awareness know of itself when it is no longer mixed with the content of experience? What is it like to simply be aware, not aware of this or that, but aware as such?
In this essay we turn to Chapter 7, ‘The Experience of Being Aware’ (pages 67–72*), and explore this question directly. We discover that the experience of being aware is not only universal, present in every human being, but is in fact the same in all. Following this recognition, we explore how awareness knows itself in the pause between thoughts, how mind is revealed as the activity of awareness rather than a separate entity, and why this understanding has far-reaching implications for the way we understand consciousness, identity and our shared being.
(*The page numbers indicated here each week refer to the original publication of the physical book – they may vary slightly from more recent versions, owing to the publisher’s design modifications.)
The Unchanging Fact of Being Aware
Not only do all beings share the same experience of being aware, but each person refers to the same experience at various times in their life. When we are five years old, ten years old, twenty, forty, sixty years old, the actual experience of being aware is always the same.
Consider for a moment the question ‘Are you aware?’ Imagine asking this of any human being on earth – an English person, a Chinese person, someone from Ghana or Australia, a homeless person, a wealthy person, someone who is sick. Imagine asking a child of five, a person of forty, an elder of ninety. As long as they understand the question, they would all answer ‘Yes’. And in answering, they would all be referring to the same experience, the simple, ordinary, obvious experience of being aware.
Thoughts, feelings, memories, personal histories and inner narratives differ profoundly from one person to another. Even the perceptions of a world we appear to share are unique. But the experience of simply being aware does not share this diversity. The knowing quality that illuminates every experience does not change. It is not English or Chinese, young or old, healthy or sick. It carries no flavour of nationality, gender, education or wealth.
