That’s an advanced, extremely important question, a fantastic question. When you think that you’re trying to find the awareness, you’re thinking. The action to try to find the awareness is thought. It’s like a looker wanting to look. There might not be a thought moving in your mind but that looking is still thought. In life, we’re so used to doing that because the looker looks at everything. You’re so conditioned by that, that when awareness is pointed out to you, you unknowingly assume it must also be findable as a thing. A meditator will unknowingly be sitting there with a quiet mind but still the sense of a looker looking for awareness is there. There’s an alertness of mind which is looking, waiting and watching, trying to subtly pursue that very same activity of seeking an object. Awareness is a unique ‘thing’ which is not a thing. The attempt to use the senses and the mind to do that is impossible but often the meditator doesn’t know that. For years, decades, lifetimes, a meditator will be sitting as the thinker, as the looker, as the watcher, waiting to find awarerness or consciousness as an experience.
What is the releasing mechanism that overcomes this obstacle? It’s noticing and recognising that there is something here that I, the mind, cannot touch, but it’s still here and I know it. There’s a knowing of it without needing to look for it or to think about it. Recognising this is the answer to how you become aware of awareness. Recognising it requires two things. It requires thinking. When you’re not meditating, when you’re at home, when you’re walking, think about this because the mind is not used to this way of observing and needs to become accustomed to it, believe in it. We have to recognise something is present now which we can’t find and we have to fundamentally accept that fact.
Then that looking and finding mechanism stops. It is a big milestone moment for the meditator that the finding mechanism stops. And then what? Then there is consciousness. Sri Ramana Maharshi says, “To know the self is to be the self.” In that statement is tremendous wisdom. The knowing of awareness is the being of awareness. This is unfindable by the senses but is here. It’s a unique category of your experience. It is this understanding that helps you recognise that, in every single experience that happens to me, consciousness is here because, if it were not here, there would be no experience. Knowing it is being it, and the mechanism for that is recognising that that is true.
In your meditation, you are trying to unlearn the previous default mechanism. It’s very mature, an advanced thing. When you’re meditating, you might not be thinking because you may have quieted your thoughts but you’re probably still sitting in the position of the watcher, identifying as the watcher. That’s the thing to be transcended. Just like you might drop a thought, so you must drop the identity of the watcher itself. Then there is what there is, and that’s the supreme Lord, the illumination within. The innermost Self is literally what I’m describing. This is it. Isn’t that beautiful