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Everything is awareness. Without awareness, nothing exists. Without awareness, we would not be talking about or discussing anything. Awareness is the original active component of existence that allows it to perceive or be conscious of itself. Ancient scriptures speak about existence as being composed of Sat (existence), Chit (consciousness) and Ananda (bliss). Without consciousness, existence has no way of knowing or perceiving itself at all. Thus, what remains when consciousness is removed from existence is something that is absolutely impossible to speak about.
The very root of our existence as manifested beings is awareness. The way that we experience ourselves and the life that is apparently outside of us is entirely determined by the strength and depth of our awareness. As our awareness increases we come to experience life in a more stable and unified way, where acting in a way that is wise and compassionate is perfectly natural and effortless. On the other hand, if our awareness remains low and we unconsciously allow ourselves to be pulled around by thoughts and emotions, then our experience of life will naturally be more fragmented and fear will remain as our core operating principle and the constant inspiration for our actions.
In human experience, we can define the strength of our awareness as the degree to which we can observe anything within either the mind or the external world without getting totally possessed, consumed or affected by it. If we are completely unaware, then the power of our awareness will be absolutely consumed by our thinking. If we are little more aware, then we will have a space from which we can discern and actually choose to follow or not to follow certain flows of thinking. If we are completely aware, that is, if awareness becomes absolutely restored within itself without recourse to conceptual thinking, interpretation or the constant presumption of the existence of an individual self-entity, then there will be no thoughts whatsoever.
Awareness is a not a specific thing that can exist within something else. Everything that we experience is an expression of awareness. In fact, our real identity is simply the awareness that existence has of itself. As that existence-awareness begins to vibrate within itself, it creates forms, dimensions, realms, universes, galaxies and worlds as dream-like expression-projections of its own nature.
Through its own freedom, sometimes awareness seem to apparently lose the total consciousness of itself within the limited awareness-perspective of one or many of its own forms. Thus, the limited experience of, for example, plants, animals and humans is born. Within these modes of experience, awareness appears to know and experience itself as beings something specific, separate and limited. Even though everything that appears is only ever awareness, it enacts a play of forgetting the full depth of its own nature. Why does this happen? There is no way of knowing. If there is a way of knowing this, then such a knowledge could never be diluted to the level of the human conceptual mind, which remains forever constrained to the limitations of the dual subject/object perspective.
What is an Avadhuta, a Master of the Dattatreya Tradition? He is a Being who has become fully restored himself in the primordial space of awareness that his body is an expression-projection of. By become completely restored in this awareness, and by dissolving all flows of identification that bring about the perception of duality, of opposites, he also expands beyond all possible manifested forms.
Thus, such a Being is aware of himself as not just awareness and its bodily projection, but also as all the dimensions, realms, universes, galaxies, worlds, beings and creatures in between. Miraculously, despite this tremendous, unfathomable state of expansion, the Avadhuta retains the projected bodily form in order to provide a bridge for other embodied beings to connect to and use as a resource for raising their frequency.
Thus, within the Datta Tradition, awareness is everything. All real purification leads to an instant and automatic deepening of awareness. The end goal of the Datta Path is establishment in a completely undistracted state of awareness, wherein all impressions toward dualistic experience are eventually exhausted. Once this state of awareness is there, and the mind is utterly silent, the expansion into multidimensionality begins.
Awareness doesn’t need to be created or manufactured because it is already everything that exists. To ‘practise’ awareness simply means to become more attuned to the feeling of being simply aware before that awareness become absorbed into the contents, the appearances, thoughts and emotions that rise up within it. Again, we don’t have to create awareness, because creation is something that occurs within the sphere of thoughts. What we are looking for is the space, the original canvas of awareness upon which thought is occurring. That space is present right now.
If we are reading, then the energy of awareness is being activated towards comprehending the text. If we stop reading, then that awareness will probably become diverted into some flow of thinking. What we need to get used to is simply the feeling of that awareness before it activates itself towards identifying with anything that appears, like thought, emotions, or even before it becomes absorbed in any external activity. By getting familiar with this basic feeling of awareness, we gradually start to dilute and lessen the power that thinking seems to have over us.
The formal practice of awareness can be separated into two parts:
We can take the recognition and re-recognition of awareness as seated meditation practice. First we should make sure that we are sitting in such a way that we can remain easily awake and alert. To become lethargic and drowsy is antithetical to what we are trying to accomplish with this practice. The best way to do this is to sit on the floor cross-legged, erect and with the spine straight. Then we should gradually become aware of the sense of being aware before that awareness become conditioned by whatever appears within it as its own expression.
This may seem difficult at first, and it may fee like we experience no real moment of pure awareness. However, our first task is to simply notice when we become lost in different trains of thought. It in that very moment of noticing, of noticing our distraction, that we are to recognise what it is that actually noticing, what is actually present. It is awareness itself. When we recognise this awareness, we should neither label, interpret or try to grasp at it. We just let it be. Inevitably, different flows of thinking and feeling will begin again. We are not to resist this. Rather, we should allow what ever arises to arise and fall effortlessly, and we should thus continue simply to notice when we are distracted and then notice the awareness that is doing the noticing.
As we begin to practice this way, gradually the time that we are able to spend simply resting without being absorbed in thought will begin to increase. Also, even when thinking, the degree to which we are fully lost and absorbed in that thinking will also begin to lessen. Thus, by practising this way, the whole mental environment will become more and more permeated by the light of our awareness, which is also, as mentioned above in terms of Sat-Chit-Ananda, the light of ananda – of bliss and contentment.
The second half of this practice involves cultivating the strength of our awareness during activity. This means that whatever we undertake, we should undertake it will full concentration, attention and dedication. If we are chopping vegetables, then we should only be focused on chopping those vegetables perfectly and with absolute precision. We should not be thinking about other things. Here we are to use the perfect performance of the activity itself as the centring point for our meditation. When we are carrying out a task, for example, chopping vegetables, when we see our mind wandering, we should gently bring it back to fully concentrating upon the task that is at hand. Whether we are externally active or inactive, it is a fact that when our attention is one-pointed, a natural feeling of bliss and well-being arises. The feeling of contentment and ease is a sign of success in the practice of awareness.
Thus, by applying these two practices, gradually our awareness will become stronger and more agile. We will start putting a greater distance between awareness itself and its contents in the inner and outer spheres of appearances. Eventually, a point will come where the very core of self-identity will collapse and fall back into awareness itself. This is when we fully awaken and come to know that we never existed as a self-entity at all, but rather we were only awareness itself existing in a mode of solidified attachment to dualistic thinking. This state of full awakening will be the basis for our further expansion.
© MyDattatreya 2021 All rights reserved
Designed by Tamara Lj.