Mindful Mindfulness - Awareness of Awareness

Quick Answer: Awareness of awareness is a nondual meditation practice in which attention turns back on itself to notice what is doing the noticing. Rather than attending to thoughts, breath, or sensations as objects, the practice invites recognition of the awareness in which all objects appear. This is not a blank or empty state. It is the recognition of a prior, unchanging presence that has always been here, regardless of mental content.

The Difference Between Object-Based and Subject-Based Practice

Most mindfulness practices are object-based. Attention is directed toward a chosen object: the breath, the body, sounds, sensations, or thoughts as they arise. The meditator, the subject, attends to the experience, the object. This structure of subject attending to object is the basic operating mode of conventional mindfulness.

Awareness of awareness practice is different in structure. Instead of directing attention outward toward an object, the instruction is to turn attention back toward the awareness itself. Not to look at something else with awareness, but to allow awareness to notice itself. This is called subject-based or non-objective meditation in the nondual traditions.

The distinction matters because it points toward a fundamentally different recognition. In object-based practice, even at its most refined, there remains a subtle sense of a meditator who is doing the meditation. In awareness of awareness practice, that sense is directly investigated. What is this awareness? What is its nature? Can it be found as an object? Or is it the finding itself?

How to Find Awareness Itself: a simple practice

Sit quietly. Notice that you are aware. Not that you are aware of this particular thought or sound, but that awareness is present. Now, without moving to any object, rest in that bare fact: awareness is here. If a thought appears, note that it appears within awareness. If a sensation arises, it arises within awareness. The awareness itself has not changed. It has not moved or blinked. It is simply present, prior to and during all content.

The instruction from teachers like Rupert Spira is: do not go toward any experience. Simply be the awareness in which experience appears. This is not a suppression of thought or feeling. It is a shift of identification, from being the content of awareness to being the awareness itself.

Connection to Advaita Vedanta

The awareness of awareness practice finds its deepest roots in Advaita Vedanta, the nondual school of Indian philosophy whose principal exponent was the eighth-century sage Adi Shankaracharya. Advaita, meaning non-two, holds that the apparent separation between individual awareness and universal consciousness is a conceptual overlay rather than a metaphysical fact.

In the Advaitic understanding, pure awareness, called Chit in the Sanskrit formulation Sat-Chit-Ananda, is not a property of the individual. It is the nature of reality itself. The individual sense of being a separate aware person is an appearance within awareness, not the ultimate ground of awareness.

This is not a belief to be adopted but a recognition to be directly investigated. The practice of awareness of awareness is precisely this investigation. Rather than accepting or rejecting the philosophical claim, the practitioner is invited to look directly: is there, in this moment, a boundary to awareness? Can a limit or edge be found? If so, who or what is noticing that limit?

Rupert Spira: the direct path and the nature of experience

The contemporary teacher Rupert Spira has articulated awareness of awareness practice with particular clarity for modern audiences. His approach, rooted in both Advaita Vedanta and Kashmiri Shaivism, emphasises what he calls the direct path: the recognition that awareness is not something to be attained but something to be noticed as already present.

Spira often asks: what is it in you that knows this experience? Whatever answer arises, including "my mind" or "my consciousness," he asks again: and what knows that? This iterative inquiry does not create something new. It dissolves the assumption that awareness is somewhere other than where you already are.

Resting as Awareness: What the Practice Feels Like

People often expect awareness of awareness practice to produce a dramatic or altered state. In most cases it does not. What tends to be noticed first is a sense of stillness or spaciousness that was already present but overlooked. There is a subtle but clear recognition that awareness has no texture, no weight, no boundary, and no beginning or end within the field of experience.

With sustained resting, thoughts continue to arise. The difference is that they are met from a different position. They are seen as movements within awareness rather than as what awareness is. This shift does not eliminate thought or feeling. It changes the relationship to them, from identification to recognition.

This is what the nondual traditions mean by liberation. Not a future state in which problems cease. Rather, the ongoing recognition that what you fundamentally are is not the stream of problems and solutions, but the awareness in which that stream appears. That recognition is available in this moment, without preparation, without technique, without attainment of any kind.