Being Aware of Being Aware

by Rupert Spira

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.

If someone were to ask us the question, ‘Are you aware?’ we would all answer with absolute certainty, ‘Yes’, and our answer would come from direct experience.

It is for this reason that, when asked if there were a single message that he would like to impart to his students, J. Krishnamurti replied, ‘I don’t mind what happens.’

This absence of duality, separation or otherness is the experience of love or beauty, in which any distinction between a self and an object, other or world has dissolved.

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.

Just as nothing happens to the screen when a character in a movie becomes sick, so nothing happens to awareness when the body falls ill. It is for this reason that to know one’s true nature of pure awareness is the ultimate healing. If one knows oneself as pure awareness, or the simple experience of being aware, one is always in perfect health. Nothing ever happens to awareness.

be interested instead in the experience of being aware itself.

Be aware of being aware.

most people go through their entire lives without ever questioning who or what it is that knows or is aware of their experience, or how experience comes to be at all.

We neglect the simple experience of being aware that remains ever-present and changeless in the background of all experience.

Only being aware is being aware of being aware.

Whether we see a landscape or a screen depends on the way we see, not what we see.

awareness loses itself in objective experience and, as such, veils itself with its own activity,

This veiling, inadvertence or turning away from awareness is known as ‘original sin’ in the Christian tradition

Original sin is, in this context, the missing, overlooking or ignoring of the essential element of experience

to sin is to turn away from God.

awareness’s apparent ignoring, overlooking or forgetting of itself.

Thus, the forgetting of our true nature is the source of all psychological suffering, and, conversely, the remembering of our self – its remembrance or recognition of itself – is the source of peace and happiness for which all people long.

Thus, the highest form of meditation is not an activity that is undertaken by the mind. It is a relaxing, falling back or sinking of the mind into its source or essence of pure awareness, from which it has arisen.

This returning of awareness to itself, its remembrance of itself – being aware of being aware – is the essence of meditation and prayer, and the direct path to lasting peace and happiness.

Meditation is, as such, the remembering of our self:

awareness is always present and aware of itself, but seems to cease knowing itself as it truly is when it loses itself in objective experience.

Awareness of objects eclipses awareness of awareness.

Just as a movie could be said to be the activity of the screen, or a current the activity of the ocean, so mind is the activity of awareness. As such, mind is awareness in motion; awareness is mind at rest.

In meditation the simple experience of being aware is extricated from everything that we are aware of.

Awareness is like the white paper. It is the luminous, self-aware presence upon which or within which all experience appears, the transparent knowing with which all experience is known and, ultimately, the substance or reality out of which all experience is made.

Enlightenment or awakening is not a new or extraordinary kind of experience. It the self-revelation of the very nature of experience itself.

Awareness cannot be discovered; it can only be recognised.

‘Am I aware?’ is a sacred question that invites the mind in an objectless direction.

The mind progressively loses its colour or activity until its essence of pure awareness is revealed.

It is the simple experience to which each of us refers when we say, ‘I am’. It is the knowledge of simply being.

Ramana Maharshi referred to this non-process as ‘sinking the mind into the heart’.

Being aware of being aware – awareness’s awareness of awareness – is a colourless, non-objective experience.

a mind that is accustomed to repeatedly dissolving in its source or essence becomes progressively saturated with its inherent peace.

Such a mind may also be inspired by knowledge that is not simply a continuation of the past but comes directly from its unconditioned essence.

Awareness is our primary experience; that is, being aware is awareness’s primary experience. Before awareness knows objective experience, it knows itself.

In the Direct Path we start with the goal and we stay there. That is, awareness starts with itself and stays with itself. Thus, the highest meditation is simply to be.

The desire for peace or happiness is the desire to return to our original, inherently relaxed condition.

Meditation is the relaxation of the tension in attention and the subsequent return of awareness to itself. It is a dissolving of the mind in the heart of awareness, not a directing of the mind towards any kind of objective experience.

Meditation is not something we do; it is something we cease to do.

However, being aware of being aware – awareness’s awareness of itself – is the only truly effortless experience there is. Everything else, even breathing or thinking, requires energy.

in awareness’s knowledge of itself – being aware of being aware – there is no need or room for any movement or activity of the mind.

Being aware of being aware is the essence of meditation. It is the only form of meditation that does not require the directing, focusing or controlling of the mind.

‘All suffering appears in awareness, but there is no one here who suffers and, therefore, nothing to do.’

meditation is what we are, not what we do, and that the separate self or finite mind is what we do, not what we are.

The separate self or ego is like the clenching of the fist. It is a contraction of infinite awareness into an apparently finite mind.

Most of us have become so accustomed to the tension inherent in the separate self that we believe and feel that it is our natural state, and so from this perspective it seems that we have to make an effort to know and rest in and as awareness.

to remain knowingly the presence of awareness becomes increasingly our natural condition, until there is no longer a distinction between meditation and life. Effortless being is our natural state.

the knowledge ‘I am’ is awareness’s awareness of itself.

the resting of the mind in the heart of awareness is known as the practice of the presence of God or the surrender of the mind to God’s infinite being.