Self-awareness…what’s that?

Yesterday at the Happiness workshop I gave at the SVCC Woman’s Festival I felt so at home there with the twenty women who attended. None fell asleep when I talked, and all we responded as we looked at our minds as if its contents were the furniture in the house that we lived in. We live looking out through the sensory windows of the mind, wanting or getting angry at the people and things passing by, but we never look at the window glass, the shades and curtains that we pull, nor the furniture inside. We don’t see the walls covered with peeling paint from layers of memories, nor do we notice the smell from buried grievances. Our attention—which has been conditioned by our culture—only peers outward, as if the house didn’t have any effect of the way we experience what we see through its windows.

But if we try to look at the interior of our mind, all we know what to do is look at it through the house of  psychology. It’s already named and cataloged by the  experts, and with this list of furniture to think about, we think we know who we are. But nothing has changed. We’re still an object without a subject. Who, we must ask ourselves, is the thinker, the observer, and the experiencer that looks at the world and itself?

Self awareness is not object awareness. Self awareness is not object consciousness. Self awareness is not even self consciousness. Self awareness is witness consciousness. Okay, what is that? Witness consciousness is like sky consciousness that is aware of clouds but is not the clouds. Witness consciousness is aware of thoughts and feeling but is not the thoughts and feelings. When are suddenly aware that you are lost in thought, that awareness is the Witness. When you wake in the morning and you witness leaving a dream and entering you everyday mind, that transitional space is the witness. The witness is the background behind self consciousness. It is the field, the sky, the ocean…the wholeness that contains the parts of consciousness that we mistakenly assume is who we are.

You can see this if you look deeply by taking your attention off what is going on outside your mental house. The witness is the eye behind the little self looking outside the window of the mind. The Witness never changes, is never born, and never dies. Like the clear sky is has no boundary, no form, and no end or beginning. The witness…is your soul.

But we have lost contact with our soul and we mistakenly think we can find it out there on the streets of the world. We are told that it is closer to us than we are to ourselves, but those are just words to put in our memory files. The little guy or gal who lives in the mind runs the house as long as the soul sleeps. So it has a vested interest in not allowing the soul to awake because when awake, the house will become transparent, as if its walls were made of glass. An awakened soul is a transparent mind, an innocent mind, a mind that is always open and that sees everything as it is, without the filters of memory, judgments and past grievances. The soul, because it is deathless, timeless, never born and never to die….has no fear.

We all have brief moments when our soul is awake: when we fall in love, when we see the wonder of the great mountains, or a beautiful work of art. For a moment the soul is awake in wonder, then the false king of the mind starts thinking and objectifies the wonder experience into an object of experience. “Wow, did you see that! Let me take a picture.”