354. Awareness, A Metaphor

Awareness is created through attention. Each and every experience I have contributes to the expansion of my awareness, as long as my attention remains sufficiently open and free to explore it fully. Awareness is nothing other than what is gained from attentive experience of both self and world.

I experience my awareness through intuitions that arise naturally throughout my life. These intuitions show me what is needed and necessary for me to do. In this way, awareness can be thought of as an understanding of how to act. Since my awareness includes the need for my attention to remain open and free, many of these intuitions are signals that I need to release my attention from a particular focus that has caused it to become stuck.

Since awareness comes from attentive experience and arises through intuition, it is not a locatable object in me or in the world. It is not something I can delimit with language and it is often not something I can wilfully access. Awareness is instead a kind of idealized entity, a metaphor for the way attentive experience affects me throughout life. While it can be deeply felt, it is also always intangible and metaphorical.

Compassion, however, is not like this at all. Compassion is the action I take to meet needs, including the need to eliminate suffering and reduce unnecessary pain. Compassion arises from awareness, as it happens in response to intuitions of need, but compassion is not in any way metaphorical. It is tangible action taken to meet the needs of real living beings — beings just like me.

Compassion exists substantively in the world and it is located in the real actions that I take because of the intuitions provided by awareness. That these essential actions arise from nothing but an elusive and metaphorical awareness is one of the many paradoxes of human experience.