Awareness and Consciousness
Awareness and consciousness are used as synonyms, but they are not the same thing.
I use this picture as a metaphor to illustrate the difference and how to understand it.
The sun, moon, earth, light, shadows, and everything that exists in the picture represent Awareness.
The light represents consciousness. Light = photons = information = Sophia = divine intelligence = super-consciousness.
Light has no reflection and is therefore non-dual and therefore a state of being. It just is.
The light’s reflection on each object creates a light and a dark side, a conscious and an unconscious/subconscious, and this is the source of duality: the reflection of light and darkness = knowledge and imagination = logos and entropy.
The pendulum between the opposites creates movement, and there cannot be movement without time and space. It is a process of becoming.
Awareness is the source of your consciousness and unconscious/subconscious. Your consciousness is the light that you can direct, focus, or use to observe something that is in the darkness and bring it out of the darkness into the light.
Awareness is eternal and spaceless (according to the Sanskrit word Nishprapansha), beyond time and space, and you have no control over it because it is not a process but a state of being. You have no choice but to always be in Awareness, whether you are conscious of it or not.
Consciousness—and the process of becoming conscious of something that you are unconscious of—goes through the subconscious. Your subconscious and unconscious are in time and space, as they are part of something that you can become conscious of (process), but you are not yet conscious of them (state of being, or Awareness). So, you are simultaneously in the process (becoming conscious) and in the state of being (Awareness).
The process and the state of being can run simultaneously in our brains.
Whilst being in Awareness, you can also have conscious thoughts. So, you are always in the state of being aware. The only thing that switches on and off is your consciousness. When you sleep, meditate, use psychedelics or teacher plants, daydream, are in a coma, or are dead, your consciousness is switched off.
Why is this distinction important?
It is important because it is the crux of why people find it difficult to meditate.
They think, or were taught, to meditate using consciousness, but that is impossible because your consciousness is linked to your ego, and that is in charge of your thoughts that come and go, like a pendulum swinging from light to darkness. It is impossible to use your consciousness to meditate. Saying to yourself “I must not think of anything” is already a thought. It is like trying to eat your own teeth.
So, meditation is a state of being. And in this state there are no thoughts. As I have explained before, you can be simultaneously in the state of being and in the process. You can have thoughts whilst you “are.”
Meditation is 'to be' in your being. You can keep your consciousness busy by focusing on your breathing or a candle flame, repeating a mantra, etc. It is important to focus on something as it runs the process on autopilot. However, you are also conscious of going into the state of being where you just are. The more you do this, the more your consciousness will make that the point of focus, to such an extent that there is no movement. That is where you enter the non-dual state of Awareness, where your consciousness overlaps with and becomes Awareness. That is the point where it becomes impossible to think.
Secondly, when you enter that state, you “receive” information, wisdom, “directions,” and solutions in your consciousness that were not there before. You can hear distinct voices that you know are not your own voice.
Thirdly, you start to use the terms correctly, and that clears up the hurdles and vagueness in your mind about what Awareness and consciousness are. You then know that there is no such thing as conscious Awareness, or becoming aware that you are conscious. You will then know that you become conscious that you are aware and can then move over in meditation from consciousness to Awareness, which is the true depth of meditation.
