Part 2 - The Opening

Awareness of Life

Awareness usually means becoming aware of something within ordinary experience. That kind of awareness has its place. It helps us function, respond, and find our way through the world.

But the phrase awareness of life points in a different direction. Here, the word life does not first mean the personal story with its changing conditions. It does not first mean the life we speak about when we say, “my life is going well,” or “my life is difficult.”

In ordinary speech, “my life” usually means the shape our human experience has taken. It includes what has happened to us, how things stand now, and what the mind imagines may still come. Because of this, someone may say, “I hate life,” while they are really speaking from pain inside a life situation.

What feels unbearable is not life itself, but what is being lived through.

That distinction matters. The conditions of a personal life can change how it feels very quickly. What felt open yesterday may feel narrow today. What seemed manageable in the morning may become too much by evening. But awareness of life itself points to something more immediate than the changing condition of a personal life. It points to the aliveness in which all of this is known.

So when these pages speak of awareness of life, they are not asking us to become aware of an idea called life. They are pointing toward the direct sensing of being alive, before the mind explains that aliveness as my story, my problem, or my future.

Life as it is, right here, right now.

Many of us know this without naming it. It may appear in an ordinary moment when thought loosens and life is felt more directly. During a walk, the body may no longer feel like something merely moving through terrain; it becomes part of the living world again. Music can open the same contact, as can a deep breath after a long day, or the simple attention of hands at work. We say, “It makes me feel alive,” because for a moment we are less trapped in thought.

The human mind is a remarkable time traveller. It is often busy with what has happened or what may happen. It revisits the past. It rehearses the future. In practical life, that has its place. But in direct experience, life is only ever here.

This moment is where life is. And we can be aware of this fact. Yet this is exactly the place we so often overlook.

Can you sense life before it becomes your story about life?

When attention returns to the senses, it returns to what is actually here. This is why breathing is such a simple and powerful doorway. It always happens now. To feel it fully is to leave the imagined elsewhere, at least for a moment, and come back into contact with life.

That is the awareness spoken of here. Not merely awareness of an object, but awareness as contact with being alive.

And when that contact deepens, the familiar sense of being a separate person with a constant story can begin to loosen as well. We are still here, but not in the same way. Less entangled in thought. Less occupied with past and future. More directly in touch with what is present before interpretation takes over.

Try this for a moment. Feel the breath as it enters and leaves your lungs. Feel the aliveness in your hands. Listen to the sounds that are here. Then ask:

Who am I, right now, here at this moment?

Do not use the mind as a reference.
Forget your name, your past, your family.
Don’t think of your work, or the story you usually tell about your life.
You don’t even remember your phone number or email address.
Do not reach backward or forward.
Stay with what is here before those answers arrive.

What am I, right now, here at this moment?

Asked in this way, the question points directly at life itself. And somehow, something in you can be aware of it.

With awareness, our relationship to what we call our life begins to change. Fear may still be present, difficulty may still be real, but neither occupies the whole room anymore. We are no longer sealed inside the mind’s version of events. Life becomes less absent.

The opening itself may still be subtle. In fact, one of its most striking qualities is its simplicity. The mind is no longer working so hard to name experience, protect itself, or keep the story going. The familiar psychological centre loosens. There is less contraction around experience and less pressure to become something. Attention gathers; it is no longer stretched so thin between what has happened, what may happen next, and the constant commentary around the self.

In awareness, perception may become more vivid, yet there is often less effort in it. The present feels wider. Space feels more alive. Experience is less crowded by mental interpretation. Sometimes there is a sense of depth that does not belong to ordinary practical life at all.

This is why awareness can be difficult to describe without sounding strange. It does not fit neatly into the language of daily functioning. It is not an object we can point to, and it is not a state the mind can fully explain while standing outside it.

When awareness is recognised, there may be a still, spacious aliveness, or the strange sense that the one who has been trying so hard to manage life has disappeared. And yet it often feels deeply familiar, as if some part of us recognises it immediately. As if what we have been looking for was never entirely absent, only obscured by the noise of ordinary identification.

What do you keep looking for elsewhere while this moment is already alive?

For some, this contact with life comes easily in the most ordinary situations. Thought loses its grip for a moment, and life is simply here.

For others, it may feel almost impossible to grasp. The mind is too busy to settle and the body is too tense so that stillness does not feel natural at first. Old conditioning may be strong. The nervous system may have learned alertness, protection, and control so thoroughly that simple presence feels unfamiliar, or even uncomfortable.

This does not mean life is far away. It only means there is more clutter obstructing it.

Awareness of life is not something we have to manufacture. It is not a prize for the spiritually gifted, and it is not reserved for people who can meditate for hours, or understand the right words. Life is already here. It was here before we learned our name. It is here before thought explains it. It is here before the mind says, I am doing well, or I am failing.

The difficulty we might experience is not that life is absent. The difficulty is that attention has been trained to look everywhere else but here.

Later, we will look briefly at the many doorways into awareness of life. But none of these doorways create awareness. They only help us to notice what is already present.

This is important, especially when the opening into awareness seems to be hidden. We may try something and feel nothing special. We may sit still and meet only restlessness. We may place attention on breath and find that the mind has already wandered away. That is not failure. It is simply the old habits surfacing again.

And by the way, seeing and recognising these habits is already part of the opening.

Awareness of life does not usually arrive as something dramatic. Often it begins as a very small shift. There may be a little more space around a thought, and because of that space the story is not believed quite so completely.

Nothing spectacular may happen, but something essential has already changed.

Because in that moment, attention is no longer completely lost in the mind’s version of life. It has touched life directly, even if only for a second. And a second is enough to show the way.

As inner conflict, compulsive thinking, and identification lose some strength, what was already here becomes more visible. Awareness becomes easier to notice because there is less in the way.

And yet, for awareness to become steady in ordinary life, it needs a foundation. That foundation is inner coherence. It is important here to see the difference between inner coherence and awareness.

Inner coherence brings us more fully into this human life. It grounds us, aligns us, and regulates the system so that we are here more steadily, more wholly, and with less inner conflict.

Awareness of life is life being sensed before it is explained. The familiar frame of experience begins to loosen. We are still here, but not as tightly confined to here. The body may no longer feel like the centre of identity. Time may lose some of its grip. In deeper moments, awareness may also open beyond the usual sense of self, body, and time. Those more intense openings will be looked at later as heightened awareness.

Inner coherence is grounding in this reality. Awareness is opening beyond the usual way this reality is experienced. That is why inner coherence matters so much.

Awareness can open without it. Many people have real glimpses before they are inwardly stable. The opening may be beautiful, profound, even life-changing. But without a good foundation, it often does not remain embodied. It becomes a memory, an ideal, or something to chase again.

Inner coherence helps us hold what opens. It gives awareness a place to land in a human experience. Awareness becomes easier to recognise and easier to live.

In inner coherence, we are fully here. In awareness, we are still here, but not confined to here in the usual sense.

That distinction matters. Inner coherence makes the system whole enough to rest in life. Awareness reveals that life may be larger than the system through which we usually interpret it.