What Awareness is:
Awareness means transcendence of the mind, so it is not the the mind that is aware. It is only through transcendence of the mind, through going beyond mind that awareness becomes possible.
What is meditation and the system indoctrination.
"Concentration is not meditation, is the opposite. Concentration is a discipline of the mind and meditation is putting the mind aside".
"Willpower is another name for your mind discipline, crystallised. The mind is already too powerful; don't make it more powerful, because then you are feeding you own enemy. Discipline for the mind means to make stronger chains, the slavery of the mind will be far more stronger".
The system trains all children to focus their minds, to concentrate, because without concentration they will not be able to cope with life. Life requires it; the mind must be able to concentrate. But the moment the mind becomes able to concentrate, it becomes less aware. Awareness means a mind that is conscious but not focused. Awareness is a consciousness of all that is happening.
Concentration is a choice. It excludes all except its object of concentration; it is a narrowing. If you are walking on the street, you will have to narrow your consciousness in order to walk. You cannot ordinarily be aware of all that is happening because if you are aware of everything that is happening you will become unfocused. So concentration is a need. Concentration of the mind is a need in order to live-- to survive and exist. That is why every culture, in its own way, tries to narrow the mind of the child. Children, as they are, are never focused; their consciousness is open from all sides. Everything is coming in, nothing is being excluded. The child is open to every sensation, every sensation is included in his consciousness
The moment you narrow the mind you become particularly conscious of one thing and simultaneously unconscious of so many other things.
The more narrowed the mind is, the more successful it will be. You will become a specialist, you will become an expert, but the whole thing will consist of knowing more and more about less and less. The narrowing is an existential necessity; no one is responsible for it. As life exists, it is needed, but it is not enough. It is utilitarian, but just to survive is not enough; just to be utilitarian is not enough. So when you become utilitarian and the consciousness is narrowed, you deny your mind much of which it was capable. You are not using the total mind, you are using a very small part of it.
And the remaining, the major portion, will become unconscious.
In fact, there is no boundary between conscious and unconscious. These are not two minds. "Conscious mind" means that part of the mind that has been used in the narrowing process. "Unconscious mind" means that portion that has been neglected, ignored, closed. This creates a division, a split. The greater portion of your mind becomes alien to you. You become alienated from your own self; you become a stranger to your own totality.
Spiritual Initiation, the first steps into the unknown of your inner reality and the way to attain your full potential.
If the major portion of your potentialities remains unfulfilled, your life will be a frustration. That is why the more utilitarian a person is, the less he is fulfilled, the less he is blissful. The more utilitarian the approach, the more one is in business life, the less he is living, the less he is ecstatic. The part of the mind that cannot be made useful in the utilitarian world has been denied. The utilitarian life is necessary but at a great cost: you have lost the festivity of life. Life becomes a festivity, a celebration, if all your potentialities come to a flowering; then life is a ceremony. That is why I always say that religion means transforming life into a celebration. The dimension of religion is the dimension of the festive, the non-utilitarian. The utilitarian mind must not be taken as the whole. The remaining, the greater--the whole mind-- should not be sacrificed to it. The utilitarian mind must not become the end. It will have to remain there, but as a means. The other--the remaining, the greater, the potential--must become the end. That is what means by a religious approach.
You have been educated to be a useful robot for the system, hiding your freedom and potential.
With a nonreligious approach, the businesslike mind, the utilitarian, becomes the end. When this becomes the end, there is no possibility of the unconscious actualizing the potential; the unconscious will be denied. If the utilitarian becomes the end, it means that the servant is playing the role of the master. Intelligence, the narrowing of the mind, is a means toward survival, but not toward life. Survival is not life. Survival is a necessity, to exist in the material world is a necessity, but the end is always to come to a flowering of the potential, of all that is meant by you. If you are fulfilled completely, if nothing remains inside in seed form, if everything becomes actual, if you are a flowering, then and only then can you feel the bliss, the ecstasy of life.
The denied part of you, the unconscious part, can become active and creative only if you add a new dimension to your life, the dimension of the festive, the dimension of play. So meditation is not a work, it is a play. Praying is not a business, it is a play. Meditation is not something to be done to achieve some goal, peace, bliss, but something to be enjoyed as an end in itself. The festive dimension is the most important thing to be understood, and we have lost it totally. By festive, I mean the capacity to enjoy, moment to moment, all that comes to you.
Everyone lives with great inner misery in a vain attempt to fill this existential void with possessions, pleasure, and sensations.
We have become so conditioned and habits have become so mechanical that even when there is no business to be done, our minds are businesslike. When no narrowing is needed, you are narrowed. Even when you are playing, you are not playing, you are not enjoying it. Even when you are playing cards, you are not enjoying it. You play for the victory and then the play becomes a work; then what is going on is not important, only the result. In business the result is important. In festivity, the act is important. If you can make any act significant in itself, then you become festive and you can celebrate it.
Whenever you are in celebration, the limits, the narrowing limits are broken. They are not needed, they are thrown. You come out of your straitjacket, the narrowing jacket of concentration. Now you are not choosing; everything that comes, you allow. And the moment you allow the total existence to come in, you become one with it. There is a communion. This communion, this celebration, this choice less awareness, this non-businesslike attitude is what meditation is.
You have been conditioned to identify with your mind, your race, your beliefs, your occupation, and so you have become a thing, not a human.
If you are not identified with your clothes, with your conditioning, if you do not say, for example, "I am my mind," it is not difficult; then you can change easily. But you become identified with your conditioning. You say, "My conditioning is me," and all that is not your conditioning is denied. You think, "All that is not conditioned is not me, the unconscious is not me; I am the conscious, the focused mind."
Until it is possible to educate human beings so that they do not become identified with their conditionings, human beings are not really human beings. They are robots, conditioned, narrowed and mechanical.
To understand this is to become aware of that part of the mind, the greater part, which has been denied light. And to become aware of it is to become aware that you are not the conscious mind. The conscious mind is just a part. "I" am both, and the greater part is unconditioned. But it is always there, waiting.
Meditation methods:
From bondage to Freedom. From misery to blissfulness.
Meditation is that it is simply an effort to jump into the unconscious. You cannot jump by calculation because all calculation is of the conscious and the conscious mind will not allow it. It will caution: "You will go mad. Do not do it." The conscious mind is always afraid of the unconscious because if the unconscious emerges, all that is calm and clear in the conscious will be swept away. Then everything will be dark, as in a forest. It is like this: you have made a garden, a garden with a boundary. Very little ground has been cleared, but you have planted some flowers and everything is okay--ordered, clear. Only, the forest is always nearby. It is unruly, uncontrollable, and the garden is in constant fear of it. At any moment the forest can enter and then the garden will disappear. In the same way, you have cultivated a part of your mind. You have made everything clear. But the unconscious is always around, and the conscious mind is always in fear of it. The conscious mind says, "Don't go into the unconscious. Don't look at it, don't think about it." The path of the unconscious is dark and unknown. To reason, it will look irrational; to logic, it will look illogical. So if you think in order to go into meditation, you will never go--because the thinking part will not allow you to. This becomes a dilemma. You cannot do anything without thinking, and with thinking you cannot go into meditation. What to do? Even if you think, "I am not going to think," this is also thinking. It is the thinking part of the mind that is saying, "I shall not allow thinking."
Meditation cannot be done by thinking; this is the dilemma--the greatest dilemma. Meditation is a state of no mind, and the meditation techniques are devices to help you to jump from the conscious into the unconscious mind.
Once you have jumped you will say, "The device was not necessary, it was not needed." But this is a retrospective knowing; you will know afterward that the device was not needed. That is what Krishnamurti is saying: "No device is needed; no method is needed." The Zen teachers are saying, "No effort is needed; it is effortless." But this is absurd for one who has not crossed the barrier. And one is mainly talking with those who have not crossed the barrier.
Final words:
The difference between consciousness, witnessing and awareness:
Witnessing is still an act: you are doing it, there is a doer, the ego is there. The phenomenon of witnessing is divided between the subject and the object. Witnessing is a relationship between subject and object....
While in witnessing a duality exists between subject and object. Witnessing implies a doer. But through witnessing awareness is possible, because witnessing means that it is a conscious act, it is an act, but conscious. Your ordinary activity is unconscious activity, like being a robot, mechanical, you follow patterns of the mind.
From ordinary unconscious activity to awareness there is a gap that can be filled by witnessing.
Witnessing is a technique, a method towards awareness. It is not awareness but the process to attain it. It is a higher state than unconsciousness. Something has changed: activity has become conscious, unconsciousness has been replaced by consciousness. One step more is needed, this activity of witnessing has to be replaced by inactivity.
It is difficult to jump from ordinary unconscious action into awareness. It is possible but arduous, so a step in between is helpful. If you begin by witnessing conscious activity, then the jump becomes easier
What is the relationship between consciousness and witnessing?
Witnessing is a state, and consciousness is a means towards witnessing. If you begin to be conscious you attain witnessing. If you begin to be conscious of your acts, conscious of your day-to-day happening, conscious of everything that surrounds you, then you begin to witness.
Witnessing comes a consequence of consciousness. You cannot practise witnessing; you can only practise consciousness. Witnessing comes a result of being conscious. The more you become conscious, the more you go into witnessing.
Conscious is a method to attain witnessing, and the second step is witnessing, then it will become a method to attain awareness.
Consciousness is a quality of you mind, but it is not your total mind. Your mind can be both conscious and unconscious, but when you transcend your mind, there is no unconsciousness and no corresponding consciousness. Consciousness is a quality of the mind awareness is the transcendence. Mind as a such is medium of duality, of all divisions, so consciousness cannot transcend duality. It is always conscious about something, a subject and object.
Every type of duality is mental. Awareness is non-dual, so awareness means the state of no mind.
Awareness means that the total of the mind has become aware. Now the old mind is not there, but there is the quality of being conscious. Awareness has become the totality; the mind itself is now part of the awareness.
Awareness means transcendence of the mind, so it is not the the mind that is aware. It is only through transcendence of the mind, through going beyond mind that awareness becomes possible.
Awareness is absolutely devoid, without any subjectivity or objectivity. There is no one who is witnessing in awareness; there is no one who is being witnessed. Awareness is a total act, integrated; the subject and the object are not related in it; they are dissolved. So awareness doesn't mean that anyone is aware, nor does it mean that anything is being attended to.
Awareness is total, total subjectivity and total objectivity as a single phenomenon. Awareness is non-doing.
Awareness is pure consciousness, but there is no one conscious about, the Seer and the seen have dissolved into one.
These are the three steps: consciousness, witnessing, awareness.
If you become one hundred percent conscious, you become a witness, then you will have to jump from witnessing to awareness. In total awareness you lose the witness and only witnessing remains, the doer is no more there, the ego disappears, the subjectivity is no more, only consciousness remains.
There is a lower state, almost everybody state of the mind, unconsciousness.
Mind is an accumulation, awareness is pure emptiness.
Awareness is the end of spiritual progress; unawareness is the beginning.
Awareness is the last state of human spiritual evolution, that is the Buddha Mind, a No-Mind, just pure consciousness without no beginning without no end, no time no space.
To live in this society you will have to learn to narrow the mind. This narrowing will be helpful when you move outward, but it will be fatal inside. It will be utilitarian with others; it will be suicidal with oneself. You have to exist with others and with yourself. Any life that is one-sided is crippled. You must exist among others with a conditioned mind, but you must exist with yourself with a totally unconditioned consciousness. Society creates a narrowed consciousness, but consciousness itself means expansion; it is unlimited. Both are needs, and both should be fulfilled.
I call a person wise who can fulfill both needs. Either extreme is unwise; either extreme is harmful. So live in the world with the mind, with your conditioning, but live with yourself without mind, without training. Use your mind as a means, do not make it an end; come out of it the moment you have the opportunity. The moment you are alone, come out of it, take it off. Then celebrate the moment; celebrate the existence itself, being itself.