Mindfulness is “the undistracted awareness of the experience of the present moment”. In a world of constant distraction, awareness becomes a skill. All skills are learned through the patient application of training. Meditation is mental training, and at the heart of meditation is mindful awareness practice.
This article is a collection of insights around awareness that help my students comprehend, appreciate and cultivate their mindfulness experience and practice.
We Have Evolved for Awareness
Human beings are finely tuned instruments of awareness. We have all the equipment already installed: little levers and buttons that can be clicked into place to experience life differently. There is nothing to add. Meditation doesn’t add anything to you; it helps you discover what evolution has already provided.
To experience total awareness, watch a cat walking across a lawn. She will be relaxed and in perception mode. She’s not judging, planning or rehearsing conversations. She is completely connected to her environment. Animals live constantly in a state that we have to practice regularly to experience.
What suppresses this natural capability in us is the modern world: the hamster wheel of working, consuming, producing, and repeating; the hamster wheel of home, finances, careers, journeys and activities. Our awareness system is fully functioning underneath all of this activity. It’s just drowned out by the noise.
The Three Levels of Awareness
There are three levels here, and understanding them gives you a map of the whole territory.
First, there’s autopilot, mind-wandering, which is how many of us spend much of our time. We’re in our minds, following the narratives and the mental movies created by our cultures, which we are immersed in and have absorbed. And all the time, the world is passing us by.
Then there’s present-moment awareness, or mindfulness, which I prefer to call ‘presence’. You’re not in your mind; you’re in your experience. You’re seeing, hearing and feeling what is actually here.
And then there’s awareness of awareness, which is what meditators call witness consciousness. You are not only present; you act as though it is true that you are present. You can watch your own attention being drawn into a train of thought and watch it return. This is the level where the deep changes happen, because once you can observe the mind, you are no longer trapped inside it.
The Rock in the Stream
To observe anything, you need a vantage point, a place to stand. Imagine sitting by a mountain stream. In the stream in front of you is a rock, largely submerged, but with just enough above the surface that you can keep your eyes on it. The rock is the present moment. The water passing is time, carrying thoughts and emotions with it.
We have to be focused on the rock to observe the movement of the water. If we’re in the water, we are carried along by the current, which is what mind-wandering and autopilot are. The present moment is the vantage point from which everything else can finally be seen.
Staying With the Wave
Presence is not a state you achieve once and then own. It’s dynamic, like surfing. The wave is continuously breaking, and the surfer stays at the beginning of the break, because if they fall back too far, the wave breaks over them.
When your mind wanders, it’s like falling behind the break. If you fall back far enough, the mental movies will wash over you. Meditation practice is the process of constantly paddling back to the front of the wave, repeated again and again. Gentle repetition is how we learn everything, and it is how we train the mind to regain its focus on the present moment.
The Radio Aerial
Here is where awareness starts to change your relationship with your own mind. It is like having a radio aerial in your head, with continuous signals coming in from a variety of channels. The signals arrive in our awareness from the mind. These signals are thoughts.
We choose, select, or compose our thoughts and then think them. They arise in our awareness the way a distant radio station arrives at a receiver. When you observe this process from the vantage point of the present moment, something significant follows: if thoughts are signals arriving in awareness, then you realise that you are the awareness, not the signals and not the noise. I recently posted about this experience of realising that we are not our thoughts, and this is the mechanism behind it.
The Expanding Bubble
Meditation is often referred to as pure introspection, but the awareness we cultivate doesn’t only turn inward. At some point, it opens outward, and our lives can open up with it.
In open awareness practice, we work with the sense of a bubble around the body, like a cocoon, and allow it to grow: too big for the room, growing into the building, then the space around the building. Sound shows you how far your awareness can reach. The awareness of sound is a bubble that can extend for many miles, because an aeroplane can be miles away and still be inside it. When we practice open awareness, we are casting a sound net in every direction: behind us, in front of us, to either side, above, and even below.
This is the same awareness that was watching the breath a moment ago, now holding a landscape. Nothing was added. You were always capable of it.
Awareness Is Already Yours
Awareness is not a gift bestowed on a lucky few. It is standard equipment, refined over millions of years, hidden directly under the noise of the oblivious modern world. The cat on the lawn has it. The surfer at the break of the wave is using it. The meditator on the banks of the stream is training it.
All that meditation practice does is to give you what was already there.