Good day, everyone!
Here’s a little something that’s been rattling around in my brain these past weeks and months, having to do with awareness and our human relationship with Reality…..
There’s an old Buddhist teaching that we might call “The Three Levels of Awareness”. What follows is my language for it and my interpretation. The three levels are:
1. Awareness of Objects
This is the kind of awareness that everyone has, no matter what level of consciousness they’re operating out of. This is also the kind of awareness that all sentient animals have. It is awareness of the outward things that we perceive, without an awareness of the perceiver.
2. Self-Awareness
Here awareness includes the perceiver. In other words, our own existence becomes also an object of awareness, just like the trees and clouds and birds and everything else that we perceive outwardly. We are aware of ourselves while we are aware of objects; we are aware of ourselves, to say it a different way, without identifying with ourselves, and so can perceive ourselves as if from the outside. This level of awareness includes the first level.
3. Awareness Aware of Itself
On this level of awareness, awareness itself becomes an object of awareness. In other words, we become aware of awareness as a thing that exists beyond our own individual minds. Awareness is an aspect of Reality, and we channel that aspect of Reality through our own individual minds. Here we are aware of awareness as something independent from our own existence. This level of awareness includes the first two.
The idea here, of course, is that our practice can raise us up through these levels of awareness, so that we may abide on the highest level. It is a beautiful but difficult accomplishment, it seems to me, and in my own experience, to interact within Life on all these three levels of awareness simultaneously–and yet this, it also seems to me, is what we’re going for. It is inevitable that we will be aware of objects, so long as we are not sleeping. With practice we can become self-aware as we perceive these objects. With even more practice, and as the result of fearless determination over time, we can become identified, you might say, with awareness itself, such that we do not forget that we exist in a context of awareness, which is the essence of the universe. This is the state that in theistic traditions is called things like “being at one with God”.
If you’ve hung around me for any length of time recently you’ve heard me going on and on about this. The thing that fascinates me about it at the moment is the fact (it seems to me) that all of our awareness, at whatever level, is subjective. Said another way, we cannot escape from our subjective experience. Sometimes I’ll call the third level of awareness “transcendent” because it transcends the limited sense of self, the presumption that we are individual entities separate from all of existence. And that is so to a certain extent. The thing is, though, that we cannot transcend our individual perspective. This is because we have bodies; because we exist in a certain geographical place, and in time; because we have our individual senses that we perceive through, and so on. In other words, we can’t help but perceive through a human perspective. We cannot perceive objective Reality.
We can certainly project an objective Reality, however. The essence of that projected Reality in Buddhist language is often called “Mind’. This word suggests the intelligence that animates all that exists (as perceived from a human perspective). A more modern and western word to suggest the same thing is “Consciousness”. “Awareness” works as well, I think. We individual humans channel this essence of Reality, this Mind, through our own individual minds, and in this way we get to peek into the nature of Reality. We can only see it from our own limited point of view, however.
Put into language all of this is quite abstract, of course, but it is not actually an abstraction for me. To me these things describe real possibilities of experience. This teaching tells me how to practice, in other words, so that I may live as deeply as I can, and so that I can experience most deeply in this life that Mind, or Universal Consciousness. This is what I wish for beyond all other things.
There you go. That’s the kind of stuff that I entertain myself with in my spare moments. 🙂 Just to consider in case it’s interesting to you. Be well, friends, and have a beautiful day!
In peace,
David