Nondual Awareness: Being In the World
Awareness isn't a stand-alone, private consciousness looking out at a separate, external universe. There is only one, unified field of consciousness. This unified field is the fundamental being-ness, the ground of existence, the “one eye which looks out from all knowing creatures,” according to Schopenhauer. Meister Eckhart put it this way: ”The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.”
From this perspective, when a new awareness birthed into the world, it is not a separate awareness entering a pre-existing world. Rather, it is a manifestation within the unified field of awareness of a seemingly separate entity in the world. But the sounds, the sights, the sensations, the thoughts are all arising within one universal field of knowing.
In other words, the world is not a collection of independent objects observed by awareness; it is awareness expressing itself as those objects. The tree in your backyard is awareness appearing as a tree. The sound you hear is awareness appearing as a sound. The feeling in your body is awareness appearing as a sensation. There is just awareness knowing awareness.
So there is no “thing” called awareness that is distinct from the “things” of the world. There is only the continuous, seamless arising of phenomena within awareness in its various forms. The sense of a private, individual “I” observing a separate “world” is an illusion, a particular manifestation within the grand play of consciousness.
This perspective does not deny the reality of trees or sounds or bodies. They are real, but their reality is understood to be fundamentally inseparable from awareness. Without awareness there can be no experience.
The nondual understanding presents a shift from being a spectator to recognizing oneself as inherently one with the whole of reality. There's no longer a need to try and connect with the world, because the world is already an intimate manifestation within awareness. Compassion, then, becomes a natural outflow because the “other” is recognized as another expression of the Self. Joy and sorrow become part of the play of consciousness, witnessed and experienced as natural manifestations without the egoic entanglement that causes psychological suffering.
Nondual awareness isn't a passive state, but a dynamic engagement with life from a place of fundamental unity. It is awareness expressing itself in the world, as the world, through every breath, every action, every perception.