The realm of the ego mind is recalling the past, judging the present, and planning for the future. But awareness of the present moment is outside of it’s realm altogether.
It seems to me that there is a direct connection between the feeling I get when I focus my observation on whatever is going on in the present moment, and the feeling I get when I focus my observation on my base Awareness. They both offer me a similar groundedness.
I’m guessing that the Teachers would say that it is because the present moment is one and the same Awareness as that which sits at our core. And that which is Awareness is everything.
Which is making me wonder if Awareness isn’t really more about how we somehow are aware of the world, which is part and parcel of the world itself. It’s more how we plug into things, but is really just another aspect of everything.
A rock doesn’t need awareness because it doesn’t have a mind that creates a separation between itself and the world. But we do; we have a mechanism for creating a schism between our individual self and that which we came from. In order for there to be separation, there must be a whole, or we would have no need to create the separation in the first place. It was only with the creation of awareness that an awareness of the separate individual was made possible. But this awareness itself is simply part of the world, so it itself is really the same thing as a rock, just another creation.
This is how awareness can serve as a portal to viewing the entirety of the world, and the same thing can be found by observing the world itself. Awareness is a real thing, just like everything that we see. But for us humans, awareness is the only real thing that we have internally. So we can either focus our observer internally at the only real thing, or externally to whatever real thing we wish. It is all the same.
So what happens when we die? Well, awareness is just as real as everything else, and as we know matter can not be created or destroyed, so the awareness is broken, but it becomes something else, since nothing is ever truly lost in this world, it just changes its nature.
Is this what is meant when Teachers state that awareness is everything? Not that everything is awareness, which is how I always understood things to be, rather that it is the same exact thing? I don’t think that is what they mean, but it does strike me as truth, so I guess we will see!