Pure Awareness

Pure awareness is the core state of experiencing reality without the filter of ego, labels, or mental chatter - a state of consciousness free from clinging and attachment. Because pure awareness only experiences the present moment, it doesn't grasp at material things, past events, or emotions. In the Dzogchen teachings of Tibetan Buddhism, "Rigpa" translates to "awareness," and is described not as an emotion or a passing state, but as the innermost nature of the mind itself. Ram Dass compared the personal ego to clouds, and pure awareness to the sky. He taught that our personality, our desires, our neuroses, our physical body are all just passing weather. When we quiet the mind, he said, we stop identifying with the clouds and remember that we are the sky.

Even cognitive scientists and philosophers have their own term for something close to pure awareness - Minimal Phenomenal Experience (MPE). It is described by Thomas Metzinger, one of the world’s leading researchers on consciousness, as the simplest, most fundamental form of consciousness possible. It is the brain's own background sense of being alert and its capability of processing information (he calls this "tonic alertness"). When you strip away all the usual content layered on top of it - thoughts, sensations, sense of self - what's left over is pure awareness.

In my own experience, I have found that focusing on the breath brings me closer to the present moment, and to the slimmest of glimmers of this awareness. It's a practice I intend to keep returning to regularly. I also stay curious, in a careful and considered way, about what other states of consciousness might reveal that I don't yet understand.