Awake awareness

Awake awareness has been described as the “groundless ground,” or the foundation out of which all phenomena rise and dissolve back into again and again. It’s a big idea, but it can be explored in manageable pieces. Developed in Tibet more than one thousand years ago and used by advanced meditators, the practice of resting in awake awareness has recently become more widely accessible through the teachings of [psychologist and Dzogchen meditation teacher Daniel] Brown and others. It differs from the well-known practice of mindfulness by involving a key shift in the state of awareness. The practitioner learns to release from thought and the sense of being an individual who is meditating, and learns to become part of a more subtle level of awareness that is not separate from self and that is everywhere.

Imagine the ocean. Instead of identifying with the waves on the surface, which are like our thoughts that come and go, you can cultivate a calmer mind by sinking below the waves. You can open the experience of the mind to become the ocean itself. This subtle level of awareness, known as awake awareness, is limitless and boundless. It is lucid, calm, still, and has the quality of love.

When people learn to drop into the field of awake awareness consistently, or even just periodically, their relationship to this field allows them to develop basic trust in themselves and in life, even when they did not have a childhood that helped to establish trust…

Radhule Weininger, Deep Trust: Finding Our Footing in a Turbulent World, Tricycle Magazine, August 2022

Simple awareness is not in anyway the same as our normal everyday consciousness, nor even a subset of it. Awareness, as Weininger points out, is an overarching presence, “limitless and boundless, and has the quality of love.” Being not separated – nondual, as it’s often described – it is “not separate from self, and… is everywhere.”

To “drop into the field of awake awareness” allows us to glimpse the underlying oneness of all things and events – modes as Spinoza calls them – and to cease trying to choose between them, to choose otherwise. In other words, to avoid the patterns of attachment and rejection before they begin.

In Buddhist and other contemplative traditions, one sometimes encounters the sense of three levels of mind: ordinary conditioned consciousness, mindfulness (attention to the present) and rigpa, awake (or open) awareness as Radhule Weininger describes above. It is not the same as, but somehow resonant with, Baruch Spinoza’s three kinds of knowledge:

Spinoza’s Three Kinds of Knowledge

In Ethics (Part II, Proposition 40, Scholium 2), Spinoza outlines three kinds of knowledge:

1. Opinion or Imagination (opinio): Based on sensory experience and hearsay—fragmentary and often confused.
2. Reason (ratio): Deductive, conceptual understanding of things through their common properties—clearer, but still mediated.
3. Intuitive Knowledge (scientia intuitiva): A direct, immediate grasp of things through their essence in God—non-discursive, holistic, and transformative.

Spinoza writes that intuitive knowledge “proceeds from an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the essence of things.” It’s not inference—it’s seeing.

(Microsoft Copilot, response to user query, November 9 2025)

To sit in open, choiceless awareness, in the plain light of what is, is in itself an act of radical trust. To let go of our cherished discrimination, our sense of ourselves as separate isolated selves sending messages to each other across a gap of disconnection instead of loving, is to realise all of a piece that there is nowhere else to be than the “groundess ground” from which all things arise. And that is uttermost trust in the “interconnected unfolding” (Weininger, ibid.) that is life, and death, itself.

What is awareness?

Sitting quietly, it becomes apparent that awareness is not the same thing at all as thought. It’s not the same as physical sensations, either. Thoughts and sensations are objects within awareness; things seen, perhaps, against stillness. Awareness is no thing; it can’t be the object of subject whatever, it seems.

Try it. Try merely being aware of awareness. (It’s much the same as Sam Harris’ introduction to the practice of Dzogchen – “looking for the one who is looking”.) You will find that there is no self to look, nor a self to be looked for, There is only awareness – and that is, after all, no thing.

To sit like this, merely aware – of thoughts just as much as sensations, of sounds, and of the body’s weight sitting – you might begin to be aware somehow of awareness itself; not as a thing among other things, but as the bright field within which things come to be. Somehow awareness itself is not other than the open ground of all that is – isness itself.

This seems to be a big metaphysical bite; but it is not to be chewed, not to be thought through. Leave the thoughts where they fall. Sit in plain awareness, and all the mind’s anxious grasping will eventually fall away like leaves in autumn. The bright field of awareness is all that is; in fact, it really is all that is. Time and place, things and thoughts, are all simply ripples on that bright surface, nothing else.

Sit still. Be quiet. There is nothing you need. Let the bright field be your only home; it is, anyway.