Being Aware of Being Aware

by Rupert Spira

Knowledge and experience are always changing; knowing or being aware never changes.

However, just as the screen tends to be overlooked during a movie due to our fascination with the drama, so knowing, being aware or awareness itself usually remains unnoticed due to the exclusive focus of our attention on the objects of experience.

Just as the screen never appears as an object in a movie, although it is fully evident throughout it, so knowing or being aware never appears as an object of knowledge or experience and yet shines clearly within all knowledge or experience.

Allow the experience of being aware to come into the foreground of experience, and let thoughts, images, feelings, sensations and perceptions recede into the background. Simply notice the experience of being aware. The peace and happiness for which all people long reside there. Be aware of being aware.

Thus, love and beauty are the nature of awareness. In the familiar experience of love or beauty, awareness is tasting its own eternal, infinite reality. It is in this context that the painter Paul Cézanne said that art gives us the ‘taste of nature’s eternity’.

The experience of being aware is in exactly the same condition now as it was two minutes ago, two days ago, two months ago, two years ago or twenty years ago. The awareness with which our experience as five-year-old girls or boys was known is exactly the same awareness with which our current experience is known. Thus, our essential nature of knowing, being aware or awareness itself has no age. It is for this reason that as we get older, we feel that we are not really getting older. The older we get, the more we feel that we have always been the same person. The sameness in ourself is the sameness of awareness.

Deep sleep is not the absence of awareness; it is the awareness of absence.

Only awareness is aware of awareness. Only being aware is being aware of being aware.

awareness does not need to do anything special. Awareness is by nature self-aware, just as the sun is by nature self-luminous.

‘Am I aware?’