There is a concept of self amidst awareness. Each of us has our own privateness, individually experienced encounters with life which validate our personal essence. I have a perfect moment in October, while the still green leaves of native cottonwood trees embank the sun burst golden maples and the lower and deepening reds of the autumn sumac, which soften the grey and weathered board fences of our neighborhood. Crows laugh at my old black cat treading the fence top with her soft white paws. Roof tops cool quickly in late afternoon shadows; scattered drifts of cloud articulate the soft blue sky. Warm sun and cool air shuffle momentarily on the skin.
For the many different elements of awareness which occur, the self might be seen as a glue which holds them together, which coordinates unity in the flux. The world which is presented to the self through awareness might be described as a sort of sphere or shell surrounding the self. And look again. If awareness is conceived as a two sided encounter between the self, or observer, and the other, the external world observed, awareness itself can be called the glue which binds self to world. And as, for anyone, the complete and entire world which that person can encounter is just and exactly the content of that person's awareness, then we can also say that that awareness encompasses, or forms a shell about, the self and equivalently the world, where they are one in awareness. Now see how our twin metaphors of glue and shell are each themselves one. As they have the same underlying phenomena, the actual experience of awareness, our concepts of self surrounded by world and of world encompassed by self, are thereby equivalent.
The life world is changed by our understanding of the priority of awareness. There may be primary reality and that reality may be aptly described by the priority of awareness. Certain images arise which describe conscious habitation of prior awareness. The center of the world becomes closer to the self; it is decentered from the self by the higher priority of unitary awareness but, even so, the center of the world is experienced as being identical essence with the self, experienced as awareness.
When separation from the all induces individual awareness, that awareness is of that separation, of the boundaries and finitude induced therefrom. This is a sort of pain, primordial and existential. It is also, however, finite, as the self is finite. Even during the course of individual being, there occurs partial reconnection, as awareness itself is always between the separated self and the all. These reconnections are felt as that pleasure of relief from separation, as relaxation of the tension of loss, of both promise and partial actuality of a return home to the all.
Separation is the source of individuation and vice-versa. As we grow our selves, becoming more particularly singular in personal structure and development, so do we increase our separation from the all, and thus our awareness, which is both our pain and our glory. It is our freedom, in so far as each of us as individuals has the power, to form ourselves in self identity and articulated separation. It is also our freedom to partially relax that separation, which is always finite, toward reconnection with the all.
The cohesiveness through which self is erected from the subject of awareness may also be imaged outward into the object where it most clearly and truly appears as other selves. Other selves give the most valid and philosophically correct projection of our own self into the object. We sometimes fall short of this correctness either by imagining other selves as less than our own self, thereby devaluating others and living in colder isolation than reality requires or through over zealous projection of our self cohesiveness into what may be intrinsically less cohesive entities in the external world, such as imagining that rocks think, which perhaps they do.
Where are you? If you are like most of us, you live amidst the common life; you sleep and stay awake; you experience perceptions of nature and the things of man, sky and wall; you live in time; some times you share with other people; some times you are alone. There is a large and common ground of experience we mostly share: watching the sky, speaking with our neighbors, drinking from a cup. Is it not wonderful that we are here, that we are alive and aware, that the world is here and that we act in this world? It is the common reality, the reality of everyday life, the reality of the present moment of being, the most singular beauty of being alive and aware, that fills me with wonder and delight, with curiosity and a sense of awe and mystery. How can such a world exist and us beings in it? What can we know about this center of our lives, this common reality?
Who are you? You know who you are, but I can make some deductions Suppose you are reading these words. I cannot know what thoughts or other acts of consciousness are occurring to you but I know that some are; that you are aware is prior by necessity to the fact that you are reading these words, if you are reading them, and the same priority applies if you are hearing them. Suppose, alternatively, that you are a scanner recording these words and, as we normally think of simple machinery, unaware of doing so; then I can write that you are not reading these words and, since you do not know what we are writing, you are not able to deny the claim. So I say: You are not a scanner; you are reading these words; you are aware.
You are a reader, reading this now, unless it is being read to you or you are remembering it. Perhaps you found a copy lying on the beach, sandy and damp; curiosity prompted you to pick it up and begin reading. I wrote this. I wrote it partly so that you would read it, as well as for other reasons. You are now reading the same words that I am now writing, the same words. And we are both simultaneously occupying the now. We are here together. But what is this place and who are we?
Where we have not yet marked off self from other, there is still openness to connection and even unity between self and other, whether between self and what we might call the external world or between self and other selves. Unitary awareness is prior to the distinction of self and other. This implies that at a deep priority unitary awareness is transpersonal, as if what we commonly consider our individual selves as well as other selves all partake in common of unified awareness, even a single awareness which is prior to divisions into individual consciousness or varying ego forms.
It is reasonably easy to ascertain the distinction between subject and object when observing nature; when we see a green leaf in the sunlight we know which is the leaf and which is our self seeing the leaf; however, watching a clear blue sky can make the distinction between self and object blur: that pure blueness, is it in my self or is it in the sky? In relationship to other people we usually find the differentiation between ego and other easy to trace, although there are interpersonal meditations in which it dissolves.