The Lexicon
Who you really are
Awareness
Awareness is the simple fact of knowing — the open, ever-present clarity in which all experience arises and is registered. It is not a thing you have but the very space you are: thoughts come and go, sensations rise and fall, yet awareness itself remains, unmoved and untouched. The nondual teachers point to it as your true nature, prior to any object, always already present and never absent. You cannot find it, because you have never for a moment been without it.
Carried by 8 teachers · across 4 traditions · 4 quotes
The purest path is simply to be aware of being aware, turning knowing back upon itself until its self-luminous nature is recognized. Nisargadatta points to the awareness in which both body and mind appear; Rupert Spira makes resting as awareness the whole of the practice; Krishnamurti calls it choiceless, a watching with no chooser. Vasugupta names this awareness, free in all knowledge and activity, as the very nature of reality. To rest as awareness is to rest as what you most essentially are.
In their words
You are not the body, you are not the mind — you are the awareness in which both appear.Nisargadatta Maharaj
Awareness which has absolute freedom of all knowledge and activity is the Self or nature of Reality.Vasugupta
The course does aim at removing the blocks to the awareness of love's presence, which is your natural inheritance.Helen Schucman
Meditation is simply about being yourself and knowing something about who that is.Jon Kabat-Zinn