How does one explicate the simple? Analysis will not do. One cannot explain the simple by showing its structure of component parts, since the essential nature of the simple is not to have component parts. Instead, one can attempt to paint the simple, to indicate or implicate the simple, showing its effects in more complex environments and pointing to and following the paths and directions leading towards and away from the simple. And yet it is sometimes necessary to approach the simple from complex beginnings; from the common plurality of ideas we draw out an underlying unity.
We can consider awareness as either one sided or two sided. As two sided, awareness conjoins that which is aware with that of which awareness is aware of. That which is aware may be called the self or the subject and that of which awareness is aware of may be called the other or the object. As single sided, awareness is the thing itself, the event of awareness, which is awareness in its purest form. Prior to the distinction between self and other, prior to the distinction between subject and object, prior to any distinction, is the awareness itself. That awareness, prior to any distinction, we call unitary awareness. Unitary awareness is on the frontier of direct experience. If we introduce the dualities of self and other, or of observer and observed, then we are already stepping back, away from the immediacy occurring in unitary awareness.
At a high priority awareness is a unity. Unitary awareness is a single essence, prior to any separation, such as observer and observed. We can attempt an approximation to the unity of awareness by synthesizing a common duality, or we can observe the unity of awareness directly.
It is common to think that the self is aware; a self implies an other, either outside the self or the self observed. Imagine yourself seeing a blue sky; at the center of that act is the seeing which occurs, which is awareness, which intrinsically has no need to call self or sky into the act but which is the pure act of awareness, of transition if you will, between sky and self, right at the boundary, the boundary called awareness, where being is, which is the most prior and true reality. Blue is blue, prior to the self which sees the blue and to the sky of blue. So, unitary awareness is a single essence, prior to any separation.
Although we have described the approach to the unity of awareness by noticing the central awareness of a simple perception, once such unity is attained it is truly unitary and without distinction and thus without boundary, which is a distinction, or limit, another distinction.
One view to focus on unitary awareness is given by a triadic dualism including observer, observation and observed. The observer observes the observed; connection and center of this connection is observation. If you see a candle flame you are the observer and the flame is the observed but the actual picture of the candle flame is the observation. In our immediate experience seeing the candle flame is prior to both observer and observed; observer and observed may be deduced or induced, say derived, from observation, from seeing the candle flame, but the observation cannot be derived from the observer or the observed. What is most directly experienced is the observation, direct awareness, seeing the flame, the occurrence of the visual picture of the flame.
Consider some consequences of unitary awareness which are prior to any distinction drawn upon that unity. Where there is not yet distinction of observer and observed there is not yet division and the unity of awareness embraces both. Where we have not yet marked off the self from the 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 or between self and the other self of observation. Unitary awareness is prior to the distinctions 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 the divisions into individual consciousness or varying forms.
Where the content of awareness is not yet marked off as being we have not defined a separation or boundary between existence and the void. When we have no division we also have no directions of past or future breaking time out of its natural presence. In flowing time, unitary awareness has content; the content that we experience is directional in its ongoing and interwoven unity; we experience a flux which is a progressive sequence of various perceptions: different forms and colors of sight, ongoing and changing sounds, other sense impressions, thoughts and feelings of the body and emotions, dreams and unnamed things. But unitary awareness contains this flux only as partial content, not as necessity
We have been examining unitary awareness in the aspects which it shows through lack of particular distinctions, such as self and other, subject and object, past and future. We can also look at unitary awareness more intrinsically to itself. At the highest priority unitary awareness is our most real reality, of all essences it comes forth and presents itself most directly. Unitary awareness also has something like extension, or at least not fixed boundaries. Unitary awareness extends through and fills the fabric of all, at least it does for us creatures of awareness, although it is prior to us as creatures or even to us, as us. We can, at least potentially, reach out and extend our personal consciousness across the great world covering arch of unitary awareness, reaching everywhere and always. We know we can do this in imagination and dream but the priority of unitary awareness teaches us that dream and imagination are not separate from reality but rather forms of the real and forms not completely isolated from the ordinary awareness of daily wakefulness.
We can search further into unitary awareness. Being most prior, unitary awareness is the ground and origin of all being that we can do or know; all being is included in awareness and unified in unitary awareness. Try to imagine being not included in awareness, by imagining it, you have included it in awareness. Bishop Berkeley once asked, "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to observe the tree fall, does the tree really fall?" We now have the answer that since we have brought the tree into awareness by the question, then of course it really falls. And the same with regards to any other tree which you might imagine, or doubt falling in the forest.
As we learn to experience unitary awareness more effectively some possibilities extend being beyond the presently common ground; we may, at the boundary of the self, dissolve that boundary and traverse the connections between self and other, between subject and object, between past and future. The unboundedness of pure awareness is such that unbounded pure awareness stretches out beyond the individual, connecting universally into a single stratum of awareness, being thus an avenue for the migration of psyches so that individual awarenesses, partaking commonly of the unifying unbounded pure awareness, can share, intermingle, trade and mutually comprehend thoughts in awareness. The unboundedness of pure awareness is also such as may extend beyond the human dimension, certainly to the brainier animals, perhaps to all life, perhaps beyond (since awareness is all we know, all we know, then it seems irrational to suppose being extends beyond awareness, or if not irrational, then a gamble, a bet without calculation of the odds); pure awareness may also extend beyond the present and connect the past with the future, perhaps through the medium of the present, but more accurately pure awareness dissolves the distinctions of past and present and future.
What we most truly know and experience, without reflection or indirection, but directly at the core of our reality, is unitary awareness. Unitary awareness is something alive, a current at the center of being. Under closely focused attention unitary awareness can grow still as a serene picture.
Recall the lake. We questioned the identity of the lake. Now we can understand the nature of the lake. The lake appears in the awareness of whoever perceives or thinks of the lake. The lake glimmers in human vision, is water to human thought and is whatever it is experienced as by the birds and the fishes. As the awarenesses of all of the entities knowing the lake converge in unitary awareness, so are all these awarenesses of the lake convergent into that thing we call the lake. As various as the lake may appear to each of us separately, in unitary awareness the lake is one and is itself, although still deeper in unitary awareness the lake itself is immersed in the universal.
Unitary awareness has content, has substance, which is the actual, actual being, which is, and which is all that is, all that is ever known, perceived or experienced. For to any of us, or for all of us collectively, the content of awareness, which can also be called the content of unitary awareness, is all that we experience and, effectively, all that is. Thus the content of unitary awareness may be called ‘all’.
We could practice a return to unity. In meditation, focus on awareness, focus on the center of awareness which is neither self nor other, neither observer nor observed but rather connection between them, essence of consciousness, unity between act of awareness and content of awareness: unitary awareness.