“Be still. It takes no effort to be still; it is utterly simple. When your mind is still, you have no name, you have no past, you have no relationships, you have no country, you have no spiritual attainment, you have no lack of spiritual attainment. There is just the presence of beingness with itself.”
At its essence, we know awareness as our awake, alive sense of being that is present before we decide to dislike what's happening and push it away or like what's happening and cling to it. We begin to know this essential, present awareness when we answer "Yes" to the most fundamental questions such as "Am I aware?" or "Do I exist?"
We have seen in our exploration of awareness so far that it is both deeply personal and simultaneously universal and impersonal. On the one hand we strive for a clear, truthful view of our direct experience, while mindfully navigating all our learned and conditioned perceptions that often obscure our view. On the other hand we also strive to be open to a more universal understanding of awareness as the awake, intelligent, object-less, transparent field of pure knowing in which all experience appears and disappears. So, we might say that in its essence and in the silence of being, we are each unique expressions or modulations of the universal consciousness we all share.