The functional chassis of all real spirituality are metaphysical statements, often called views. Each view is a way of understanding reality. Every view in real spirituality is connected with a “way”. The way is the path to being that view.
The “I am awareness” view is that of chunks of Hinduism, especially Vedanta and its various offshoots. The best book written from this perspective is “I Am That”, which I recommend highly. A good one, especially the first forty percent or so is “The Essence of Enlightenment” by James Swartz.
The “I am awareness” argument is that the only thing which always exists is awareness, and therefor that is what we are. We are not our bodies, or even our consciousness: both can be absent and awareness still exists.
Everything I am aware of is an object in consciousness. This is obvious. All of these objects change over time, often appearing and disappearing. Whether they exist or not, I always exist: they are dependent on me, I am not dependent on them.
One may suggest this isn’t true by two methods. The first is “I’m not aware when I’m in deep sleep.” With enough meditation of the right type you can prove that wrong: you can be aware that you are deep asleep and if someone yells near you while you’re in deep sleep you wake up, so awareness appears to still exist.
The second is that awareness didn’t exist before birth, and won’t exist after death. This is a more serious objection, but it’s not proven, and certain experiences on the spiritual path where you appear to exist without the body suggest it may be wrong. Instead you simply don’t remember before your birth.
To many this will seem like utter nonsense, but most people haven’t done the necessary work to have an opinion worth caring about.
There are a few ways or paths towards this view. The main one is simply examination. Is it true that objects come and go and I remain? Watch sense objects and see what happens. This is meditation. It’s part of what Buddhist Vipassana does, actually, though only part.
A second is to simply concentrate on the sense of “I am” and don’t pay much attention to anything else.
A third is the Vedantic super-imposition method: you learn the view and apply it. Whenever you think “I am the body”, you simply correct the thought to “I am awareness.” (There’s more to it than that, I’m simplifying vastly.)
Our normal view is something like “I am the mind, which is produced by the body, and I live in a world that is not me.”
Most spiritual paths say that the body exists in the mind (it does, though that doesn’t have to mean that it isn’t produced by the brain).
So what’s the benefit of having this view, of grounding it in?
First, you let go of sense objects. You don’t push bad sense objects away (pain, fear, etc…), and you don’t try and grasp good sense objects (love, happiness, etc…)
If you leave sense objects alone, what happens it that the bad ones bother you less and the good ones last longer.
Second, when you don’t regard the body and mind as “you” suffering drops massively. It’s not happening to you, you don’t have to care. Suffering is basically pain times attachment.
Third, your conditioning weakens. Every time a conditioned sense object comes up, if you react to it with anything but detachment or detached love, it is renewed and usually grows stronger. Say you were once burned and are now scared of fire. Every time you see or hear fire you are scared. You try and push the fear away. The fear is renewed, and may even grow stronger. If you don’t care, if you don’t react or you counter-act the fear with love or another positive emotion, the conditioning weakens.
Fourth, your general level of fear grows lower. Over time your ambient anxiety drops. Almost everyone has some anxiety, even if it’s below the threshold of consciousness. As fear goes away it is replaced by a directionless detached love. You feel love all the time. When this starts, it’s intermittent. You feel happiness or love for no reason you can determine. Over time it becomes more and more steady. (I’ve spent fairly substantial time in this state. It’s not theoretical.) As best I can tell, human nature when truly not scared IS love.
The more solid your identification with awareness is, and the less you identify with consciousness, sense objects and the body, the better your experience is. This seems to be what the Hindu types are talking about when they say that the nature of the self is bliss. You no longer rely on getting things, having things or circumstances in order to feel good. You just… feel good.
There’s more to all this, of course, rather vast volumes have been written about it, often in allegorical language which is hard to understand if you weren’t trained it. But this is the essence: you are awareness, and fully knowing that frees you of the need for objects at any psychological level. Of course, if you want the body to stick around you’ve still got to take care of it, but you are no longer subject to the tyranny of running from desire to desire and away from fear after fear.
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Close to the end of the annual fundraiser, which has been weaker than normal despite increased traffic. Given how much I write about the economy, I understand, but if you can afford it and value my writing, I’d appreciate it if you subscribe or donate.
Nate Wilcox
Thank you for this Ian. I’ve been enduring a two-year nervous breakdown since losing steady employment and I need to heed this advice.
Neal Oldham
Thank you Ian. This is a nice summary and I know there is a vast iceberg of practice under the surface.
Tc
“The more solid your identification with awareness is, and the less you identify with consciousness, “
Did I miss the distinction between consciousness and awareness? To me these are synonyms.
Do you mean awake consciousness vs sleeping or coma? To me these are just different focusses of consciousness. Sometimes I am aware of my thought train while falling off to sleep and I catch the few first thoughts in sleep which make perfect sense in the language of the sleeping focus yet the same thoughts and words are gibberish in terms of my waking language of words/symbols. In the same way that walking motions dont work effectively when you reach a certain depth of water and swimming motions make no sense out of water. But it all seems like consciousness, just different focuses.
Ian Welsh
The claim is that there’s awareness even when not conscious. It’s a slightly different usage than usual for English. Although some teachers don’t agree with the distinction.
“I am that” discusses this a few times. Might be worth reading if you want to pursue further.
jemand
So, I have gotten slightly close to some of these ideas a few times, enough to glimpse what this kind of text refers to (I think. Maybe I’m totally wrong.)
“I am awareness” never felt quite right though, more like “the universe is aware” or maybe: “Awareness Is.”
“I” felt like much too small and individualized a word to fit and felt like smuggling in far too much baggage of meaning for what the evidence actually supported in that experience state.
Concerns being raised about the temporal nature of the awareness would also feel immaterial. The universe IS aware, the moment of awareness is eternity and no time at all, whether it was always aware or will always be so isn’t really relevant.
Is that… part of this view? a different spiritual view altogether? Maybe I’m completely off base?
Ian Welsh
The universe is aware because you are aware & you and universe are the same.
jemand
Yeah. That doesn’t feel wrong, so much as interposing any pronouns in there feels like a distraction. Especially since viewed closely enough the “I” or “you” just becomes more of a swarm or mix of not so unified an existence while at the same time the distance between that non-unified “self” and all the other points of awareness in the universe starts to blend away to unimportance.
I guess it does mean what I’m talking about isn’t that far off from what you’re discussing here, or what any of the books and traditional paths refer to either. It’s interesting, because my first exposure was not from any sort of teacher. More just — I was literally a child who frequently lived in my head and had a lot of insomnia, though it never really caused me distress. Instead, I spent hours nearly daily pondering questions. One of the most returned to question I had, for years and years (age 6-11 or so), was how I could tell if I was dreaming, and when would I wake up? I would watch this question internally eventually through lucid dreaming, and the corollary question of “If everything I think I remember so far is just a very long and vivid dream, what would *I* be if I were to wake?” (which might be close to the “focus on ‘I AM’ feeling” path).
That got lots of places, but one to mention is the point where sanity felt like a pure choice. Anything experienced, is experienced through the mind, anything the mind can imagine can be experienced. It was almost like a literal door to anywhere but with the knowledge that moving onto those choices did not have any guarantees the door would remain to come back. Facing that option, it’s not scary in the moment, but after choosing to stay in “consensus reality” a couple times the self that remains and keeps more of the traditional reaction to stuff starts to find the whole meditation exploration idea terrifying.
Anyway, I mostly lost the time for that sort of focused contemplation and left it for awhile. Much later (in college) I picked up the idea of “*WHERE* am I” being an interesting question. Start by finding the where when the question is asked (usually a particular point within my skull), then eventually, move the point once found. Moving it is relatively easy within the skull, with slight adjustments to “conscious feel,” but a much, much more dramatic jolt when moved to the heart. Other internal body areas are also interesting, as are near-body-but-out-of-it positions. I never tried to actually travel, that wasn’t the point. But — the “in the heart” existence is kind of a pretty comfortable one, I tried to keep it some days beyond the concentration to get there. It’s hard, though.
Later I did some lovingkindness type meditation (after I found your blog, this was when you first started writing about it.) There is a slight commonality to some of the whole-body-feel with the lovingkindness state as there is in the “in-the-heart” consciousness location, but it’s just the whole-body-state. The diffuse love is separate.
It’s been a long time since I really worked on any of this. And again, really never following any written guide (except your fairly simple one). I tend not to really trust the complicated stuff, or things from other people. Observing animals and “nonliving” natural elements I have found to be more productive (probably because I have a lot more trust there’s no duplicity there).
Ian Welsh
Yeah, the traditional Buddhist view is that there is no self. If you look at sense objects, you’ll never find “you”. The end experience is pretty much the same from what I can tell, but it’s interpreted differently. Either way, no object can be you. If there are only objects, well, that’s it. The Vedanta types and most Hindus say “wait, there is one thing that’s always there, but since it’s the subject you can never view it directly. (The eye doth not see itself, etc…)
Might be worth your while to do some meditation of “I am” or some such. Read “I am that” if you’re interested, it should point you in the right direction. Intellectual knowledge IS good, but you need to grind it in.
Clonal Antibody
Jiddu Krishnamurti was a master at being able to communicate that to his audience. There should be many audios and videos of his lectures. Here is one linked below
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFWBaBdH2qw
Ian Welsh
Much as I love Krishnamurti, as far as I know he got only one person enlightened.
He spent almost all his time on freedom from conditioning and how conditioning rules you. Absolutely correct, but I don’t think he got thru to a lot of people, or not enough.
Clonal Antibody
“as far as I know he got only one person enlightened.”
As one of my teachers once stated,
“those who get ‘it’, do not hang around me any more – those who do hang around me, are the ones who are not getting ‘it'”