Awareness - simple, ubiquitous, unassuming. To experience is to be conscious. To be conscious is to be aware and alive. In the present and to the present. Life is thus experience, conscious and aware, ever presently.
Does this mean that when we are neither awake nor dreaming, we are no longer conscious? For if so, we would no longer be alive but dead. In deep dreamless sleep, are we not devoid of awareness or consciousness? Does that mean we are dead when we sleep dreamlessly or when we are in a coma?
No. For if so, we would not be able to wake up in the morning. The fact that we awaken from sleep to live another day is proof that we did not die the night before. This is obvious. But what exactly is the nature of deep dreamless sleep if it is not death? The answer is simple yet not immediately apparent. We are resting in the unlit ocean of consciousness - pristine awareness - that is our innermost nature.
Awareness is without duality, boundary, demarcation, devoid of qualities yet intrinsically us without being autonomous and isolated from everything else. Awareness spontaneously modulates into all that is seen, heard, smelt, tasted, touched, felt, thought, and willed as well as the presumed knower who sees, hears, smells, tastes, senses, feels, thinks, and wills. Awareness is ever-present yet at the time of dreamless sleep not vividly known or brightly appearing to us. For awareness can never be known as an object. Awareness is simply there as the backdrop to all experience of knowing and the known. Awareness coalesces into the knower and the known, illustrating its dynamic effulgent play. Awareness is the nondual knowing that is never known yet vividly bright in waking consciousness while dazzlingly dark in dreamless sleep. Awareness never ceases nor can it ever cease (except by sovereign divine will).
Awareness is the very quality of our being alive. Awareness pure and pristine, naked and free. Awareness that is sometimes called our spirit. We can say that our spirit, our innermost essence, the fundamental ground of our being, is but a stream of living breath from God (see Genesis 2:7). For in Him we live and move and have our being (see Acts 17:28).
Can we be aware in every moment? Not dimly or inchoately but fully and brightly? Can our awareness be so vivid that - though never known as an object - is always freely self-knowing while nakedly resting within its own place? The place of no-place? In simple naked awareness lies the potential for a life that is free from suffering though not without suffering, and free to flourish though not without responsibility. Awareness gives a chance at life that is spontaneous and significant. Awareness offers us a chance of in-breaking grace from an hitherto unknown God - our Triune God who knows us and calls us into His knowing - that will set us absolutely free. For this reason, awareness is and ever will be. By His grace. - CK
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