The Heart of Awareness

Three Levels of Awareness

In this essay, I want to write about awareness, and how to cultivate it. Warning: it’s going to be a long, strange trip. But then again. Isn’t life? So here are my three levels.

Pure awareness. Let’s start with the truest, the highest level of awareness. Since we are rationalists, materialists, empiricists, rather than prove it to you philosophically, let’s just discuss it with a little bit of science.

Two photons at opposite ends of the universe can “know” what each other are doing, and respond. Weirder still, the “effect” can precede the cause. This very simple experimental data, replicated en masse in quantum physics, tells us two very important things.

First, the ultimate nature of reality is awareness. The universe itself is aware. It knows. It isn’t a dead thing. There are no dead things. Awareness is the field in which beings exists. And you are a tiny piece of that awareness. We’ll get to that.

Second, that awareness is beyond time and space. Remember the photons at opposite ends of the universe? Their interactions are “nonlocal”, that is space doesn’t matter to them in the slightest. And their interactions are “atemporal”: they happen faster than the speed of light, as if time itself never existed at all.

So ultimate reality is a kind of pure awareness, beyond space or time. Tibetan Buddhists call it Rigpa, which means pure luminous cognizance, with no phenomenal substance. In the Christian sense, it’s love. What else is love but witnessing the pure essence of a life?

If that doesn’t make sense, it’s OK. Here’s the point. If ultimate reality is pure awareness, and that awareness is beyond time and space, then that awareness is right there in you. You are a part of being too, aren’t you? Let me draw an analogy. Seeing a shadow, you think you are the moon. But in fact you are more like the sun which illuminates all things.

That true, pure, unmarred awareness which is all that truly is is something you already are. It’s something that you can “access”, though that’s a terrible word for it. You can experience it, here and now, because it is the truth of you. No space or time, remember? So you’re not a “piece” of that awareness. You are that awareness. No life, no death, just awareness, shining through these billions of ideas you will call “you”.

Now how are you to experience all that, to get a tiny glimpse of all that ultimate reality, of that pure awareness, shining through you every second? The funny thing is how hard it is. It’s difficult. Almost impossible. You can meditate for a lifetime and never get closer. The simple secret, which is no secret at all, is that you have to shift down to a lower level of consciousness.

What bridges the gap between ultimate reality, awareness beyond time and space, and our phenomenal reality? We see “things”, “light”, “color”, we have emotions, we feel grief and loss and joy and pain. Where do all these “things” come from?

They are karma, which is the next level of awareness. Karma to the Western mind is a fairytale: do good things, and you’ll get some kind of reward. That is a fairytale, because that’s not what karma is at all.

Awareness of karma. Karma isn’t you “have” or something you “do”. It’s what you are. You: not the ultimate you, the phenomenal you. The little fiction you call a self. That “thing” is karma.

Karma is all the concepts and notions you hold in that tiny little head. All those concepts are stitched together by the idea of “you”, right? So karma is all those concepts, together, which determine your intentions, actions, behavior, all of it.

Let me give you an example. One of the concepts in your mind (you’re a terrible person) is that minorities are lazy. Of course, “you” are not —they are, because they are not you. Thus, the idea of a “you” stitches together all karmic concepts. This little concept that all minorities are lazy and you are not now shapes and molds how you act in daily life. What is its effect? It limits your very own happiness, freedom, meaning, purpose. You can never really give much to the world, relate to people, hold them, even see them. So you grow embittered and angry and afraid.

Karma. Now you get it.

Now expand that one concept — “minorities are lazy” — to all your conceptual notions. All of them. This is good, that is bad, this is true, this is false, I am this (awesome, a failure, great, dumb, whatever). Together, all that is your karma — and the sum total of your karma is operating, always, everywhere, shaping your life. It is “you”.

Until you learn to see it, and let it go. The moment that you begin seeing your conceptual reality is the moment that you can begin shaping your phenomenal reality. Until you can say “hey, I have this foolish belief minorities are lazy, and it’s costing me relationships, peace, opportunities, maybe I should let it go”, you are a prisoner in this life. A prisoner of what? Karma. All the concepts in your mind, which are like bars in the cell of a prison.

Karma connects phenomenal reality with ultimate reality. If we could let all our conceptual thinking go — all of it, even the concept of ultimate reality — then we could instantly be face to face with pure awareness, beyond space and time. But it’s hard, almost impossible for us to do that. Because even facing our karma takes coming down to a still lower level of reality.

To really let our karma go, what do we have to do? We have to see its effects, don’t we?

Maybe we meet a person one day. They are black. We hold this foolish belief that minorities are lazy. Secretly, we fall in love with them. Now what happens? There’s conflict, isn’t there? We think: I can’t love them! They’re beneath me!

Now we have two choices. We can clearly see the effect of karma on us — and on them — or we can stay blind. If we choose to see, what do we see? We see how our karma, our conceptual reality, is just causing great suffering to our phenomenal selves. That is what karma does. Conceptual thought is suffering, not just because it is separation — but because it is ignorance of reality.

Heart awareness. So now we are at the grossest level of reality: the awareness of the heart. Maybe we can see that our karma, which is the sum total of our conceptual thought, is causing pain and suffering everywhere that we go, in everything that we do. That these foolish concepts and ideas, beginning with the idea of “us”, are just hindering us from fully being. Without being aware of your karma, which is the truth that “you” already contain the effects of your conceptual thoughts, how can you ever change your way of being?

At the heart level of awareness, we begin to become, slowly, stumblingly, familiar with all the pain and suffering and hurt and longing and desire and anger we are causing. To ourselves, to others, to those we love, and so on. We begin to really become aware of the emotional effects we have in this tiny life, on the hearts beating around us. That is how, and only how, we can really ever see our karma, which is just the stone that has caused these ripples in the waters of being.

The awareness of the heart is the key to letting our karma go. The gift of the awareness of feeling is that it reveals our karma to us. My concepts make me feel this way, they make me suffer that way, they limit me from growing in this way. Now I see my karma, the totality of myself, in a purer and truer way. But I have begun with the effects on hearts: mine, theirs, ours. So to begin seeing all this karma that we contain in our little heads, the effects of all these concepts, which are just fabrications, we must use the awareness of the heart.

Every idea is just an idea — it is not a reality, beginning with the idea of “you”. Thus every idea will cause our phenomenal selves suffering, because it keeps us from coming face to face with reality. Whether that is the reality of people, of places, things — or the ultimate reality of pure being doesn’t matter. Karma is there to separate us from truth, and that ignorance is the root of suffering. Really becoming aware of that suffering unlocks us from the prison of karma.

Thus, thought causes suffering, by distancing us from reality. Conceptual thought is the truest ignorance in human life. If we think too much, we feel too little. And if we feel too little, though we may suffer less now, we will never really see our karma, and be able to let it go.

That moment we become heart aware is the instant we begin our journey in awareness. That is when we really begin to see. Now we can finally think: “maybe I am wrong. Maybe I need to let these foolish ideas go”. The more that we do that, the closer to reality we come. The reality of people, places, things, and then of karma, of how our phenomenal selves are just conceptual fabrications, and then, ultimately, of pure awareness.

The truth is that many of us never take the journey at all. We do not even become heart aware. We are just slaves — or robots—of karma. We hold these complicated and interlinked and utterly false concepts in our heads, we never investigate them, and they program our whole lives. In that sense, our lives can be predestined. But the destination is the same: suffering, pain, numbness. It is in that sense that ignorance is the root of suffering.

We are all walking the same way home, whether we know it or not. Some of us just walk in the wrong direction. Home in this tiny life is the same for each and every one of us: pure awareness, which is the truth of us.

So let us guide another one the right way. We cannot walk each other’s paths. But we can walk arm in arm.

Umair
April 2017