Can you imagine total non-existence? Everything you see, hear, know, feel now, stops… Your whole life was an always-changing succession or mix of these things. Now call to mind that existence as a whole, not one detail or moment, but the whole consciousness which your life is/was/will be. This is what I am calling Awareness.
This Awareness, though its ‘contents’ are always shifting and morphing, has some constant aspects. One obvious one is the fact that it does always appear as things, even if that’s impressions, dreams, weird mental states, unnamed objects or experiences. It does always have appearances, that’s how it is what it is. And these, obviously are known as appearances – even if unnameable or confusing. Every appearance has to be known in this primary way or there is no appearance. This we could call Clarity.
responsive, emotional
We respond to these appearances in various ways, with a feeling component, sometimes strongly, sometimes fairly neutrally. Sensitivity is inherent in Awareness. We are inherently feeling beings, not biological robots.
The variety of possible appearances is infinite, and could be conceived in myriad ways, there is an “anything-ness”, an open potential to Awareness, even though fixing an appearance as any “thing” is to discover that it is impermanent, made of other “things”, and so is not really that fixed thing we named. There’s an anythingness without any thing-ness, an Openness.
Furthermore, the way things appear, in any of the senses, is that they appear as spacious. There is always an element of spaciousness to immediate experience, even in dreams, with eyes closed, whatever. We can take this for granted, thinking that we are objects in space, but even the idea of an object needs the idea of space. And since that element of space is inherent to immediate experience we see that it is a quality of Awareness.
get off the hook
There is good reason to dwell on this in meditation and in everyday life, because that can take us back to our Awareness, our immediate un-categorised experience, when we are caught up in a mandala of thinking. Yes, thinking is also part of our overall Awareness, but when we are hooked by a particular storyline we don’t see it as thinking, we are prey to its emotions and their reactivity.
Pieces of Five 