Welcome to the ‘pure land’ of knowledge, a land of ‘pure knowledge’. This
‘pure knowledge’ is not knowledge ‘of’ or ‘about’ things but direct subjective
knowing. Though it has had many names - gnosis, wisdom, intuition, realization,
enlightenment, awakening - its essence, quite simply, is awareness. Welcome then, to the World of Awareness. Welcome too, to
‘The Awareness Principle’ - a principle transcending both science and religion
as we know them. The Awareness Principle transcends science because it
recognises that the fundamental scientific fact and the true starting point of
all scientific investigation is not the existence of a universe of things or
beings in space and time but awareness of
such a universe. By this I mean not simply my or your awareness, or even our
awareness or God’s awareness but awareness as such. The single most important
misconception running through the entire history of Western thought is the
belief that awareness is either a mere by-product of matter or the private
property of individual beings. What if it is the other way round? What if all
things and all beings are but individualised portions and expressions of an
ultimate or absolute awareness - one that is not the product or property of any
thing or being we are aware of? From this point of view ‘God’ too, is not some
sort of supreme being with awareness. Instead God is awareness – a divine and all-pervasive awareness of which all
beings and all things are but a portion and expression.
Theists and atheists can argue endlessly about whether God ‘exists’
without ever asking what we mean by the word ‘God’. What neither of them
question is whether or not what we call ‘God’ is any type of existing being at
all. There is a paradox here. Let us consider it more deeply. The paradox is
that the ‘existence’ of God would reduce what we call ‘God’ to one existing
thing or being among others, thus turning God into something limited and finite
– hardly a fitting understanding of the divine. What I call ‘The Awareness
Principle’ transcends the question of God’s existence or non-existence -
arguing that even though not an existing thing or being like any other, God is
nevertheless the ultimate reality
behind and within all things and all beings. That is because before and behind
all existence – all existing things and beings – is awareness – awareness of existence and awareness of being. Let us
consider this again. To ask whether God exists is like asking whether you or I
exist – whether we are? How do we
know that we exist – that we are? How
do you know that you exist – that you are?
How do any of us know that we exist – that we are? We know because each of us
is aware of being. It is this most
intimate, profound and primordial awareness
of being that belongs to the very core and essence of every existing being.
Since this basic awareness of being
belongs to the very core of every existing being it also transcends every
existing being. This pure and profound awareness of being, and not any thing or
being we are aware of, is the true essence and reality of God – the divine.
Whilst God is not some supreme Creator
being ‘with’ awareness, God is that
awareness which is the absolute, universal and divine reality behind and within
all Creation and all Creatures. People who believe that God is a supreme being
however, and not a supreme and absolute awareness, are forced to believe that
God ‘made’ or ‘created’ the world out of nothing. Atheistic scientists, on the
other hand, still seek an alternative explanation of how the universe and all
things came to be. For Creationists the answer to the question of how things
came to be is some Big Being they call God. For scientists it is some cosmic
event they call the Big Bang. Both are badly mistaken. A theist is someone who
believes that God is an existing being that has or possesses an omniscient
awareness. An atheist denies the existence of such a being. Modern science
claims that awareness can be reduced to the by-product, property or function of
some existing thing, like the human brain. What they are actually claiming is
that awareness can be reduced to or explained by some particular thing we are
aware of. Yet there is another
paradox here to consider more deeply. For surely just to be aware of something,
to perceive it and be capable of observing and studying it, already assumes the
reality of awareness as such? Thus to
seek a cause for awareness in any thing we are aware of – the brain for example -
is like seeking a cause for a dream, or for the whole experience of
dreaming as such, in one particular thing we dream of. This is patent
absurdity. But it is an absurdity that has yet to be clearly pointed out. The
Awareness Principle does so. For its 1st Principle of Awareness is
simply that Awareness as such is the
1st Principle of all things. Why? Because awareness cannot – in principle – be explained by or
reduced to any thing or being we are aware of.
That is why I prefer to use the term ‘awareness’ rather than
‘consciousness’. Consciousness is awareness of
something. Awareness on the other hand is consciousness as such – pure consciousness.
This is not just a philosophical or
semantic difference. The things you are conscious or aware of may include your reflections on or ‘felt sense’ of the words you
have been reading, bodily sensations or needs such as hunger or thirst, your thoughts
and feelings, the basic mood or ‘tone’ of feeling you find yourself in, your
perceptions of the room around you and the objects within it, things that are
concerning you or challenges that you face in your current life, memories of
the past or anticipations of the future etc. You may be conscious or aware of any or all of such things. Yet the awareness as such is not any of those things. To understand this, just think
of the space you are sitting in and the objects in it. The space contains your
body and those objects but is not itself
a body or object. Similarly, the awareness of a need, desire, sensation or
impulse, feeling or thought is not itself
a need or desire, sensation or impulse, feeling or thought.
This principle is one of the most important
Principles of Awareness that leads us to what I call The Practice of Awareness.
Let us take one example. The awareness of a thought is not itself a thought.
Therefore it is something innately free of thought. Often when people talk
about meditation, particularly Buddhist sitting meditation or Zen, they are
caught up in the idea that to meditate properly and achieve a higher, more
‘enlightened’ state of awareness they must stop
thinking. Even the Zen masters thought so. The Japanese master Dogen said
that Zen is all about finding the answer to a single question. The question as
he put it was “How do you think ‘not thinking’?” The answer to it is simpler
than most people imagine – namely that there is no need in the first place to
‘think’ not-thinking. All we need to ‘do’ is to simply be aware of our thoughts. For though thoughts and thinking occur
within awareness, the awareness of them is not itself a thought or thought
process. The true question is not “How to think ‘not thinking’”.
The true question is how not to think thinking but how to simply be
aware of our thoughts and thinking, knowing that awareness of our thoughts and our thinking is
something innately and entirely free of thoughts and thinking. Likewise, our
awareness of a desire is not itself a desire and thus something innately free
of desire. Thus there is no need to suppress any desires to be free of them.
Let me say that again, there is no need to stop thinking - or to stop having
needs, impulses and desires, in order to be free of them – for awareness as
such is innately free of any thing we are aware of - whether a need, impulse,
desire, feeling or thought.
I define The Awareness Principle as a new
foundational principle for science, philosophy, psychology, religion and life.
It is a new foundational principle for science
because it recognises that the starting point of scientific investigation – the
most fundamental scientific ‘fact’ - is not
the ‘objective’ existence of a world of bodies in space and time but subjective
awareness of such a universe. It is a
new foundational principle of philosophy because it recognises that awareness of existence or being is prior
to and therefore transcends all existing things - all ‘beings’. It is a new
foundational principle of psychology because it argues how, in principle,
awareness cannot be either the by-product of any thing we are aware of, or the
private property of any self or being we are aware of. It is a new foundational
principle of religion because it allows us to recognise that God indeed does
not ‘exist’ as a supreme being with awareness, but is awareness - and therefore the ultimate reality behind all
things. Thus just as there can, in principle, be nothing ‘outside’ of space or
‘before’ time (the problem of Big Bang theory) so there can - in principle - be
nothing outside awareness, nothing outside God.
Finally, The Awareness Principle is a new
principle of life. For the basic Principle of Awareness leads to a new type of
‘yoga’ or Practice of Awareness – one
which liberates our consciousness from attachment to any thing we are aware of.
It does so not simply by repetitious talk of ‘non-attachment’ or ‘mindfulness’,
as if these words were mantras - but instead by clearly explaining and
re-minding us of a basic and fundamental principle: namely that the awareness of a need, impulse, desire,
feeling or thought is not itself a need, impulse, desire, feeling or thought,
and is therefore innately or inherently free of any thing we are aware of. The
awareness of any thing is not itself any thing at all. Yet the fact that
awareness is ‘no-thing’ does not mean that it is nothing. On the contrary, it is what makes awareness more real than
anything. Awareness, then, is not anything. And yet, awareness, ultimately, is
everything. For there is nothing – no thing – that is not a shape taken by
awareness, a manifestation of awareness and an individualised portion of that
ultimate all-pervasive awareness that is God.
Put simply, the Awareness Principle
recognises, in principle, three fundamental truths. The first fundamental truth is that awareness as such is no ‘thing’ –
and cannot be reduced to any thing we are aware of. The second fundamental
truth is that awareness is everything.
The third, no less fundamental truth, is that everything is an awareness. A thought or feeling for example, is
not just some thing we are aware of. It in turn is an awareness of something
else. We take it for granted of course, that human beings are not just ‘things’
we happen to be aware of. Instead we understand that each human being is
themselves an aware being. That is
not to say that human beings - or any beings - simply have or possess
awareness. Rather, like every atom or cell, animal or plant, rock or tree,
every human being is an awareness.
That is not to say that atomic, molecular or cellular awareness has the same
character as human awareness. Yet the human body is an organic symphony of the
awareness that constitutes each of its atom and molecules, cells and organs.
And the human being is a unique and ever-changing constellation of different
tones and textures, movements and directions, patterns and qualities of
awareness.
To truly be aware of another human being
is to sense the unique tones and qualities of awareness which shape and colour their experience of the world and other
people. When we speak of another human being as ‘warm’ or ‘cool’, ‘close’ or
‘distant’, ‘closed’ or ‘open’, ‘light’ or ‘heavy’, ‘bright’ or ‘dull’, ‘rigid’
or ‘flexible’, ‘solid’ or ‘airy’, ‘icy’ or ‘fiery’ we are not merely describing
them in ‘metaphorical’ terms - describing our sense of a person’s ‘soul’ with
words deriving from sensory qualities of things. Instead we are giving
expression to innate sensual qualities of their awareness or ‘soul’ - and of
awareness or ‘soul’ as such. It is not that sensory qualities of things become
mere metaphors for soul qualities. Rather it is these very sensual qualities of
awareness or soul – soul qualities - that find expression in the sensory qualities of all things. ‘The World of
Awareness’ is the ‘soul world’ lying
behind and beyond our physical world and life. There, as in our dreams, the
qualities of awareness or soul qualities that colour our moods and come to
expression as sensory phenomena and their qualities – a dark or black mood
being perceived as a dark or black cloud for example. Similarly a euphoric
feeling of ‘levity’ or being ‘uplifted’ may translate itself into a dream of
our body levitating or flying. What we experience as our dream body is nothing but our eternal soul body as such. This is not our objective physical body – our
body as perceived from without, but our body as we are aware of it and feel it
from within - our inwardly felt or ‘subjective’ body. What we call ‘the soul’ is our inwardly felt body – essentially a a body of awareness made up of sensual shapes,
tones and textures of awareness.
Our most direct and immediate inner
awareness of our bodies is imbued with tangible ‘elemental’ qualities - ranging
from dense solidity or rigidity to watery fluidity, airy diffuseness, spacious expansiveness
or fiery vitality. It is such ‘elemental’ soul qualities that the sages of the
past knew as the true meaning of ‘the five elements’ – understanding them as
both basic elements of nature and our own human soul nature. Elemental
qualities of awareness find expression not only in our immediate proprioceptive
awareness of our own bodies but constitute the ‘soul’ of all bodies
– no matter whether these be dreamt or physical, bodies of people or bodies
of seemingly inanimate, insentient or unaware ‘things’. Our physical bodies
themselves are but patterns of atomic, molecular and cellular awareness. Though
their human physical form may
decompose when we die, the awareness that imbues every atom of them does not.
The individual combinations of soul qualities that shape our sense of self and imbue our body with its unique form survive after death in the form of
the ‘soul body’ itself. This remains perceptible in the soul world – the world
of awareness - even without physical form. Each night it takes non-physical
form in our dreams - not only in the form of our dreamt body as such, but as
the entire ‘body’ of our dream environment and every other body within it. Just
as our entire dream environment is the larger body of our dreaming awareness, so is our entire waking world the
larger body of our waking awareness - itself part of a multidimensional World
of Awareness that we remain largely asleep
to.
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