Consciousness, Awareness, Presence, Here-Now, Attention

Are these words all pointing to the same thing?

First, it’s important to note that these are all words. There is really no such “thing” as consciousness or awareness or presence or Here-Now or attention. The referents are unfindable as any kind of graspable object(s), and yet, these words point to undoubtable actualities. The words consciousness, awareness, presence and Here-Now are often used synonymously or interchangeably, but not always. Sometimes these words are used to distinguish and point out different aspects of this indivisible, seamless living reality that has no actual boundaries or limits.

These words get used in different ways by different teachers, and even by the same person in different moments, and this can lead to much confusion. We may be talking about the same thing using different words, or we may be seeing things differently. It’s always helpful to clarify how terms are being used if it’s not obvious. And I encourage all of us to listen openly and try to get a sense of how words are being used by a particular speaker or writer in context, rather than clinging dogmatically to any single definition or any one way of expressing deep insights. Otherwise, we become closed and rigid and unable to hear anyone who expresses the same essential insights differently. What follows is what I mean by these words, but I have used them in other ways at times, sometimes interchangeably, and I might use them differently tomorrow. So don’t take what follows as immutable definitions, but more as possibilities. What matters isn’t the words or the particular map any writer or speaker is using, but rather, waking up to the living reality itself, which no words can capture.

I would say that the words consciousness, awareness, presence and Here-Now all point in some way to the common factor in every different experience. The first (root) experience is what is often called the I AM, the undeniable knowingness of being here now. We don’t need to look in a mirror, or read about it in a book, or have someone else tell us—we know beyond the slightest doubt that we (as conscious presence) are here and that something is appearing here. We never experience anything outside of consciousness—or we could say, outside of Here-Now, this timeless, unlocatable, open aware space in which everything appears and disappears. And in deep sleep, even the first sense of being present disappears, along with everything perceivable and conceivable. What remains is often called primordial awareness, but it could also be called Consciousness, depending on how one uses that word. What we most fundamentally are (the primordial groundless ground) cannot be objectified—it can’t be seen.

Consciousness, as I tend to use the word, is what I call the movie of waking life or present experiencing. It includes sensing, perceiving, thinking, conceptualizing, remembering and imagining. Its creations are not unlike the dreams that come during sleep. It is the apparent collapsing, dividing up and solidifying of indivisible unicity and ever-changing energy into apparent multiplicity, the creation of apparently substantial forms out of what is actually formless no-thing-ness. Consciousness is the world of duality and apparent separation, including most basically the thought-sense of subject and object, self and not-self. Consciousness is also the appearance of time and space in what is actually the timeless, dimensionless, placeless, ever-present, utterly immediate Here-Now. Without the appearance of time and space, and without the appearance of duality, there would be no coherent experience or ability to function. Consciousness draws boundary-lines around “things” and reifies or freezes what is actually thorough-going flux into apparently substantial, separate, persisting entities: chairs, tables, nations, planets, atoms, molecules, people, emotions, historical events, life situations, presidents, and so on. It tells stories about cause and effect, success and failure, gain and loss.

And yet, the more we investigate the apparent duality, the more we discover it isn’t actually there. In our direct experience, everything appears right here at zero distance, even the functional sense of distance, just as everything only happens now, even the apparent unfolding of time. Experientially, visual sensation is not divided into seer-seeing-seen. The division is conceptual. Experientially, the cheep-cheep-cheep of the bird is right here, utterly immediate, no gap, no separation. The ten thousand things seem to be separate and independent of one another, but only if we don’t look too closely. Nothing can actually be pulled out of the whole, and nothing ever appears outside of consciousness.

Awareness is upstream from consciousness. While consciousness seemingly divides unicity up into apparent multiplicity and duality, awareness is nondual. It is unicity, boundless wholeness, seamlessness. Awareness has no beginning, no end, no inside, no outside, no opposite. It is the ever-present Here-Now—timeless, immediate, infinite and eternal. It is intelligence itself, that which is aware of thinking, that which sees thoughts as thoughts, that which recognizes the false as false, that which is conscious of being conscious. It is what remains in deep sleep, prior to the I AM, prior to any experience.

Awareness is not separate from the movie of waking life, but it is not entangled in the movie or trapped in the drama. Consciousness, on the other hand, gets easily mesmerized and hypnotized by its own creations, sucked into its own imaginary dramas, identified with the characters it has created, lost in the stories it is spinning. Awareness is that which beholds the play of consciousness without being caught by it. Awareness sees the thoughts as thoughts, it sees the drama and recognizes it as a passing show. Awareness is the light behind attention that illuminates and dissolves all imaginary problems and false identities. In that sense, we might sometimes speak of "being unaware" of something, or being "more or less aware." What we really mean is being more or less attentive to something. Because the light itself is never really absent, only apparently veiled, just as clouds may seemingly block the light of the sun.

Awareness is that which is aware that consciousness is disappearing as we go under anesthesia or fall asleep. It is what we are dissolving into. Awareness is like the movie screen or the mirror in which all the movies and reflections come and go. Awareness could be described as the unconditional love that allows everything to be as it is.

Here is how Nisargadatta Maharaj puts it: “Awareness is primordial; it is the original state, beginning-less, endless, uncaused, unsupported, without parts, without change. Consciousness is on contact, a reflection against a surface, a state of duality. There can be no consciousness without awareness, but there can be awareness without consciousness, as in deep sleep. Awareness is absolute, consciousness is relative to its content; consciousness is always of something.”

I use the word "presence" in two ways—sometimes I use it to point to "being here now," being knowingly present and not "lost in thought." It is a quality of attention that is open, spacious, relaxed, alert and awake to the sensory-energetic actuality and presence of this moment, rather than being engaged in thoughts or fantasies. It is a sense of impersonal boundlessness rather than feeling like an encapsulated, separate "me." In this sense, we might speak of "being in presence" or "having a sense of presence." It is a particular quality of attention that comes and goes. At other times, I use the word "presence" to point to the all-inclusive aliveness, beingness, immediacy or present-ness of everything, including thoughts and fantasies—the common factor in every different experience, whatever shape or form it may be taking. In that sense, everything is presence. It is the one constant that does not come or go and that never departs from itself.

By Here-Now, I mean this one bottomless moment that is timeless and unlocatable, the immediacy or present-ness from which we can never depart and in which all experiencing happens. Now is the only real eternity. And however far we travel, we are always Here, in this immovable aware presence.

Attention is the capacity for focusing the light of awareness on particular objects (sights, sounds, sensations, ideas, memories, body parts, and so on). We can give attention to our breathing, or to the felt-sense of presence, or to the tingling in our feet, or to the clouds in the sky, or to the birdsong, or the traffic sounds, or the pain in our tooth. Attention moves from place to place, while never leaving here-now. Attention can be narrowly focused or very open and global.

Awakening is often spoken of as a shift in attention and identity from person to presence, from encapsulation and separation to boundlessness. But attention is always moving, and like a zoom lens, it can be zoomed in or out, onto the personal or the impersonal, the limited or the boundless. No one controls this zooming in and out. And so, more profoundly, being awake is the absence of needing the lens in any particular place, or trying to always be zoomed out, identified as awareness and not as a person. Awareness beholds and allows it all. It is everything. Nothing is excluded! Nonduality includes (and transcends) duality, but it is not against duality.

And remember—and this is critical, there is no such “thing” as awareness or consciousness or presence or attention or Here-Now. These are words, labels, conceptual abstractions that we use to point out certain aspects of the (actually undivided, seamless) living reality. What such words point to is not a concept, but once we start talking about this living reality and using words, it’s important not to mistake the pointers (the words or the maps) for the territory and the different aspects of the territory that they help us to notice. There is no actual boundary between consciousness and awareness, or between self and not-self, or between inside and outside. No such “things” actually exist.

Everyone sees a completely unique movie of waking life. In the movie, aware presence gets conflated with an object that appears in the movie. We believe we are a character in a story. We lose sight of the awareness that is beholding the whole show and the undivided seeing-listening-being that has no boundaries or limits. We identify as a fragment in an apparently fragmented world. We think "the world" is actually an objective, observer-independent reality that is "out there" somewhere, outside of consciousness, and we believe we were born into it and that one day we will die.

But the apparently separate self, if investigated closely, is simply ever-changing thoughts, sensations, memories, mental images and stories appearing in consciousness. It cannot actually be found as any kind of substantial or persisting entity.

If you try to grab hold of a thought, you can’t! It is a burst of energy, gone in an instant. You can have a memory of it, but the original thought has vanished. “The body” is actually ever-changing, thorough-going flux, inseparable from the so-called "environment" around it. You cannot find any place or moment in time where this body began or where it ends. You can think that it began at conception or at birth, but where did the sperm and egg begin? In nature, everything is recycled—dead bodies become fertilizer for the soil and food for other life forms, and everything is made up of everything it is not. The body could not exist without air, sunlight, water, parents, grandparents, food and everything that makes the food possible—in short, without the whole universe being as it is, the body would not be here.

Are you limited to the body , encapsulated inside of it looking out? We’ve learned to believe that this is true, and we believe it so strongly that it actually seems like our experience. We mistake the map for the territory without realizing it. But if you look at your actual direct experience, isn't it equally true that the body is appearing in you, boundless awareness? Many spiritual teachings land on the idea that we are exclusively boundless awareness and not the body, just as scientific materialists tend to land on the opposite idea that we are only the body and that consciousness is a brain activity. In reality, we don't know exactly how the brain figures in all of this, or for that matter, what the brain even is! Go closely into the so-called "brain" and it, too, dissolves into an indeterminate subatomic dance that is mostly empty space. Scientific and metaphysical ideas are both super-imposed on life itself by thought. Maybe we don't need to land on either side of these conceptual divides. Maybe we can live in the groundlessness of not knowing.

If you look closely, you won’t find an actual boundary between inside and outside of you, or between self and not-self, or between awareness and the content of awareness. There can be a profound sense of being seamless boundlessness, impersonal awareness, the ever-present Here-Now, but a certain degree of identity as a particular person will still show up intermittently as needed. It may disappear completely in many ordinary moments when there is no need for it functionally and no thought of "me," but short of a brain injury, it will never be totally absent all the time. We cannot deny the body and the person, but at the same time, we cannot deny spacious, open, boundless awareness.

Liberation is the seeing through and falling away of imaginary problems (flat-earth problems, based on a false understanding of how reality is). Liberation is a relaxing of the grasping mind, a letting go of beliefs, an opening into groundlessness, and above all, simply being what you always already are and cannot not be: Here-Now, open, free, aware presence, being and beholding present experiencing, exactly as it is. If you’re looking for this awakeness, you are believing the thought that "this isn't it," and that "you" exist apart from this undivided unicity and somehow need to "get it," and that "it" is some thing or some particular experience other than the present experience, which has already vanished as quickly as it arrived. Reality is no thing and no way in particular. It is all-inclusive. It's right here showing up as the taste of tea, the sound of traffic, the knowingness of being present and aware—just this!

Don’t be confused or mystified by words and ideas. Simply be what you cannot not be, what is here before all the explanations and formulations, and what remains even in deep sleep and when the whole universe is destroyed. And if you're looking for that, relax! You are that! We overlook the utter simplicity of this by trying to get into some special state of presence, or trying to have some flashy enlightenment experience, or trying to get rid of the self, or trying to identify as boundless awareness and not as a body or person. But all of that arises from the sense of being a separate, deficient self who needs something better or different to happen. Just be Here-Now—hearing the traffic, smelling the coffee, breathing, thinking, sensing, awaring—simple, simple, simple. And we don't need to call it anything. All the words can fall away. They serve their purpose, and then, let them go.

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