Guided Meditation: Being Aware of Being Aware

In your experience right now, there is consciousness, but you may have become desensitized to this wondrous fact. In this guided meditation, you won’t become conscious, for consciousness is already present. Instead, you will become conscious that there is consciousness or aware of being aware. This meditation ideally calls for a video camera or a digital photo camera as a prop, but even if you don’t have one, you can still do the exercise.

1. Take a few moments to relax any tensions in your body. Take a few deep breaths.

2. If you have a video camera or a digital picture camera, perhaps on your smartphone, turn it on. (If you don’t have one, you can just imagine this scenario.)

3. You don’t have to record anything; just look at the moving image in the screen on your device as you pan the environment. Is your camera aware of the scene? Is it “seeing” anything? How does the camera feel from its own perspective? Does it feel anything?

4. Now put the camera down and scan the environment not like a video camera but as your conscious self. Become aware of being aware. What does that feel like?

5. Now contemplate the difference between the way you see and the way a camera sees. Feel into and be that difference. What does it feel like? (You can use any one of the five senses for this meditation.)

6. Remain in the wonderment of this contemplation for at least three to five minutes, also allowing the body to vibrate with the felt, kinesthetic implications of any experiential insights that may have been triggered.

Hopefully this guided meditation made you wonder at the presence of awareness by making you aware of being aware. This book is largely an investigation into—and celebration of—the difference that you have discovered in this meditation. Whatever it is, that difference is the most vital aspect of life since it evokes experience and knowledge. It is your greatest treasure and is what separates you from an automaton. When you ignore or are asleep to your self as conscious light, you are like an automaton that just scans the world passively or robotically, dead to the aliveness that you are.

It’s helpful at first to perform this meditation repeatedly. Keep noticing how miraculous it is that there is the sense of subjective experience, not just a robotic, inert scanning or recording of a lifeless physical environment. Being aware of being aware is a sort of juicy, vibrant knowing. Throughout your day, even for short moments at a time, keep sensing and feeling into this perspective intuitively, as though you were immersing awareness in a bath of warm water. Allow your entire being to fall in love with and to become ravished by this contemplation, soaking in that love and ravishment for as long as possible. You will find that, far from being a cold and lifeless nothingness or “void,” consciousness is almost unbearably sweet and precious. It is full of heart. The more you soak in consciousness like fruit in a mixture of honey and brandy, the more it dawns on you that you are benevolent wellbeing itself, pouring your intoxicating sweetness on whatever you gaze upon.