The Body-Mind is a Lens for Awareness
The experience of being a separate person residing within a physical body moving through time and space is a stubborn and persistent illusion. Surely awareness is localized behind the eyes, right? Indeed, the body and mind are faculties through which consciousness perceives time and space, but awareness itself is not confined within the body, despite how it seems.
Sensory organs and neural networks are like date gathering instruments through which localized awareness can perceive the dimensions of space and experience events in time. It could be said that eyes are like cameras and ears are like microphones.
But the awareness which illuminates creation cannot be limited by any part of that creation, just as a screen cannot be fundamentally limited by any part of the content it displays.
The finite mind, accustomed to locating everything in space and time, struggles with this concept. We instinctively try to place awareness somewhere, either inside the body or, if not, then outside it. But both inside and outside are spatial concepts, creations within time and space. To apply concepts to awareness in an attempt to understand awareness is to misunderstand the fundamental nature of awareness itself.
Rather than think about awareness as outside time and space, it may be more helpful to think of awareness as inherently timeless and dimensionless. It is not that awareness exists at some point beyond the cosmos, but that it is the very source from which the cosmos arises. Awareness is the limitless light that illuminates all forms while remaining formless.
Awareness, then, is fundamentally unknowable to the mind in a conventional, objectifying sense. Awareness is the knower which cannot be made an object of its own knowing.
Awareness is our most intimate experience. It is the undeniable fact of “I am.” It is the knowing presence even in the absence of thoughts or sensory experiences. Pure awareness transcends conceptual thinking precisely because it is the very ground from which conceptual thinking springs.