Being Aware of Being Aware

by Rupert Spira

When we come out of bright sunlight into a dark room, we cannot do anything with the mind to make the objects appear in the darkness. We just stay there and relax, and slowly the objects emerge. Meditation is similar. There is nothing the mind can do to find or know awareness, for the mind is a limitation of the very awareness for which it is in search. Anything the mind does is simply more of its own veiling activity. Meditation is the subsidence of the activity of mind and the subsequent revelation of the very essence of the mind – pure knowing or awareness – to itself. Only awareness knows awareness. In the non-activity or non-practice known as meditation, the activity of the mind subsides and, as a result, its essence of pure awareness, having lost its apparent limitations, stands revealed to itself as it is.