What are the characteristics of awareness? Awareness is cognizant, perceptive. Awareness is immediate thus present and in the present. Awareness is pure and unmarked by thoughts or beliefs or convictions. Awareness is spacious, unfettered, free (thus free of and free from). Awareness is luminous which is why knowing/cognizance is experienced as vibrant, kinetic, electric, and stimulating. Awareness is at peace within its own nature and non-dual from its own nature. Awareness is not two, not dual. Awareness is non-two, non-dual.

These are buddhic attributes.

When awareness plays in the fields of perceived duality, human beings call that life and perception, me and mine, you and them, and all manner of temporary perceptions that are taken as real and as lasting. Yet, all perceived distinctions fade in the expanse of free, the spaciousness of Awareness.

One purpose of meditation is illumination: one illumination after another. At first, tranquility is the fleeting result of taming the wandering mind and emotions. Then tranquility is the experienced peace resultant from ease with one’s self and one’s emotion-mind-ego. Then tranquility is discovered to be the ground of one’s being. Live its simplicity off the cushion and in one’s relationships and one’s experiences ripen with peace and ease of emotions and mind. Ego’s clutch on its reinstated reality loosens. Then tranquility is experienced as the substrata of presence, and presence as constant, and constancy as simple, and simplicity as easy. Ah, Awareness is.

A disciple once asked the Buddha, “What is Nirvana?” “It is awareness,” he replied.

This evolution is the experience of every dedicated meditator: dedicated to one’s sitting practice, yes, but equally important, to the in-the-moment application and integration of the techniques of meditation into every facet and moment of one’s life.

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