Becoming Aware of Awareness - Hogen Bays, Roshi 

A satisfying answer to these questions can only be found by looking at your direct experience. This is why we meditate: to learn first-hand what awareness is and who it is that is aware.

Your awareness/consciousness is that which looks at the dot at the end of this sentence. See it?

everything you experience in life is not real, it is just awareness. So that is all there is to your life, awareness of experience.

That’s probably not the best way to phrase it: “not real.” People told me this at one point and I became very bad mentally. A better way to put it is this: What you experience is never the whole truth. What we are experiencing is very real. Saying “nothing is real” is not the whole truth. Patrick, you don’t need to understand it. Don’t even try. Do Zazen, do Zazen without intention, and you’ll gain some true personal- NOT intellectual-understanding.

@@deanshearer328 you're a good man to explain to Patrick. When a person disentangles from identification with his/her thoughts and emotions there is an opening to a higher consciousness. Some meditators reach that state and experience a profound sense of freedom and connect to an oceanic clarity that has no content. It just is. (so hard to conceive mentally) But we in the West are constantly taught to see ourselves in terms of body and the social unit that we are told we are. A constant reinforcement of that identity throughout life. Clinging to it becomes the prison that most people see and believe.

@@rr7firefly Yeah, for sure. Like I said, I was really bad mentally at one point because I tried to understand so hard that I creating one huge illusion. And everytime that illusion started to fade away I went nuts. I'll stop there, haha. Good day to everyone.

It’s not a case of understanding it conceptually. The only way to really understand it is to experience the insight for yourself and then it will shift your consciousness to a higher state and it will allow it to be understood. The way I was able to do it was to strip away everything that I was ‘not’, e.g I’m not this body, because even without it I would still be me. I’m not these thoughts because I am able to observe them, I’m not the feelings I experience or the labels I’ve been given, then what’s left? Awareness itself. The second I experienced this insight, my consciousness shifted. You have to actually ‘do it’ to understand it. I hope this helps 💫 💕