Who’s Aware of What?

One cannot ‘be aware of awareness.’  There is only one awareness and it’s already self-aware.  Everything else—all the perceptual and conceptual qualia—is but a prismatic refraction of this awareness.  What is really going on when one refers to ‘being aware of awareness’ is either thinking about awareness, or thought becoming so still that the intrinsic self-awareness of awareness is obvious.  Anything you have to remember to do with your attention actually concerns thought.  Whether it’s the focusing of thought or the stilling of thought, it’s still a function of thought.  This includes mindfulness techniques, whether they go by that name or not1, in that an increase in attention or mindfulness corresponds to a stabilizing or quietening of thought.  In fact, we could even define attention simply as the relative focus or stillness of thought. 

Thinking can be focused or concentrated, such as in contemplation, or it can be momentarily stilled in order to more fully register the purely perceptual and interoceptive content that is already present.  Either way, greater attention means less thinking.  Thought itself is inert and has no capacity for independent awareness.  ‘Pure attention,’ so to speak, is actually simple awareness, minus thinking.  But make no mistake, that simple awareness is always already present, whether one is deeply engrossed—‘lost’—in mile-a-minute thinking2; spacing out in trance; dreaming up a storm during sleep; or sitting on a cushion facing a wall with a totally alert, quiet ‘mind.’  Awareness is that within or by virtue of which any of these (or infinite other) conditions or states can register at all

1  Examples include the self-remembering of Gurdjieff and the attending-the-actual (ATA) of Bob Harwood.  When in conversation with Harwood at a retreat I casually alluded to his ATA as mindfulness, he bristled, saying that unlike Vipassana, in which one is to watch one’s thoughts along with perceptions, with ATA one is to ignore thoughts and attend only to raw perceptions. His objection was based on the common assumption that attention is a separate awareness that can be trained on thinking along with any other qualia.  But to challenge that assumption, notice what happens to thinking when one applies an intent to observe it: the thinking quells to the degree of the intensity of the observing (as in the well known example associated with Eckhart Tolle, of the quietening effect of watching for the next thought as a cat watching a mouse hole).

2  In this notion of being ‘lost’ in thought lies an important clue to the nature of one’s mistaken identity: how else could one feel one had been ‘lost’ in thought, if not that one’s very identity had its projected source in the movement of thought?