The mind is a jar that contains things which we experience as thoughts, emotions, sensations, ideas, opinions, decisions, reactions, memories, doubts, fears, expectations, anxieties, suspicions, pain — the entire gamut of our interpretation of life. They are all there in the jar where lighter things rise to the top and heavier ones sink to the bottom.

This jar also houses an invisible medium in which everything is suspended, like fish in the sea. The medium itself is a simple form of awareness which, unbeknownst to itself, vivifies everything it becomes aware of. Neither the jar nor its contents are aware of themselves. They are known only through the medium of awareness and this medium is the only thing that can be aware of itself.

When the contents in the jar are rendered more quiet and still, the awareness surrounding them naturally withdraws its consciousness of them back into itself. In doing so it becomes aware of being aware. It realizes itself as the ‘light’ that makes everything else visible.

This light of awareness, however, is not visible even to itself. It simply becomes aware of being aware; never as a thought, inner voice, impulse, sensation, or emotion of any kind. It is a silent, motionless inner presence that has the capacity to be consciously aware — to see and be aware of seeing. At the same time, it is the only thing in both the inner and the outer world that cannot be seen. What this implies is indescribable because it is so completely other than the mind and the mind’s very limited ability to conceptualize.

Awareness inside the jar of the mind is also like the air inside a room: it is independent of the room and all the furniture in the room just as air outside is independent of the world and all the objects in the world. And there is no lid on the jar to prevent awareness from ‘escaping’ into the sky. The only thing keeping awareness mind-ridden is its own fascination with things around it. The more it remains fascinated with (attached to) the jar and the contents of the jar, the more it is appropriated by them as myriad forms of ‘I’, ‘me’, and ‘mine’ — the ego self. 

This false appropriation is our number one dilemma, yet awareness does not have to force its way out. It has simply to realize itself as awareness, let go its psychological grip on things, and start being.This is the essence of enlightenment and all else follows from this.

from The Little Book of Awareness | © copyright Peter Ingle | All Rights Reserved