Meditation can lead us to a new understanding of the word “awareness”. The faculty of being aware – knowing what is happening – implies an awareness of something, even if that’s only our thoughts – as though one thing were aware of another.
Mindfulness practice, or the aspect of mindfulness in Buddhist meditation, is the basis for the deeper appreciation of our experience termed “vipashyana” (vipassana). If we don’t know what our experience consists of, we won’t come to see how our experience is, its quality rather than its meaning to us.
a bigger view
Later it may become clear, or be pointed out to us, that this “being aware” is all we know: our senses including thinking are our everything. We may think this is a world with us in it, but that is just a thought, another manifestation of Awareness. We can mark the significance of this by capitalising it as “Awareness”, as opposed to the “awareness” of one thing knowing another.
If it is all undivided Awareness rather than one thing aware of another, then Awareness must include an aspect of appearance, and an inseparable aspect of knowing. This has to be the case, otherwise, no awareness!
In this deeper appreciation of experience, what is “inside” or “outside”? What is me and what is not? What is desire, jealousy, anger, what is suffering?
two ways of knowing
When translators use the word “cognising”, I assume they are distinguishing this mere knowing, bare Awareness, from the way of interpreting I first described which is more like naming, recognising, conceptualising – you could say, ‘thinking our experience’.
Meditation is the place to pursue appreciation of these subtly but crucially distinct possibilities for the word “knowing”, and for our way of using the word “Awareness”.
Pieces of Five 