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A mirror is not cognizant of what is appearing in it. The opposite of cognizant would be ignorant, or oblivious, or “unaffected by”
The allegory of a mirror is often used to help individuals understand what awareness truly is like. It is said that, like a mirror, awareness reflects all manner of things and yet is never affected by what appears.
Unfortunately, there is a misleading problem lurking within this allegory which instills a very false understanding of awareness in those that take this allegory to heart, in the absence of direct meditational insights of the nature of awareness and of mind. Granted, the misunderstanding is already held to be the truth by most people who have not yet trained their minds, so they find this allegory very acceptable.
While awareness may be like a mirror which is unaffected by what it reflects, awareness isn’t reflecting anything, and in this important way, it is not like a mirror at all. That unaffectedness that is part of this allegory is ultimately true of awareness, but the image of reflections in a mirror is completely misleading.
It is true that a mirror reflects what is before it; but it also reverses that image relative to the viewer. Perhaps we should focus more on that reversal aspect of a mirror’s reflection than we do on its reflectivity, because describing awareness as being like a mirror — even allegorically — conveys an understanding of awareness that is completely opposite that which is necessarily true.
Awareness is not reflective. Images of things are not reflected in awareness. This would imply a dualism of subject and object, which is ok if we are talking about a video camera, or a set of eyes — mundane things, in other words— but it’s not ok when we are speaking of that which can be directly known (imperienced) as the ground or origin of all manifested phenomena, and which is nothing other than the very naturing of all those phenomena. But most of us miss that rather significant bump in the road to enlightened speech, in part because we are taught the allegory before we can counter its false structure with actual insight.
Yet, even in relation to its unaffectedness, this allegory is contrary to our everyday experience and leads us to a proliferation of reified “minds” which are used as necessary explanatory devices to get around the initial error of holding that awareness is unaffected by what appears “in the mirror.” This whole concept of “mind” is a fundamental error which causes us to impose a dualistic structure on a necessarily nondual reality.
Awareness is essentially the aspect of cognizance of the activity of this nondual reality — its responsiveness — and cognizance is not reflectivity. It is what it says: knowing; but not in the normal sense of someone having knowledge of something, especially something abstract, but rather, as a performance in which what is known is shown in the performance. Knowing how to dance is not a set of instructions on how to move — instead, it is the ability to move in certain ways. And having a trained mind is not the accumulation of facts and instructions on how to train your mind, read from some source text — rather, it is having done the practice for some length of time and thereby having accomplished the training of your mind.
So what is it that reality knows? Well, everything — you, me, this planet and the sense of beauty we discover when we see it for what it is, these words, every living thing, even those that we, because of our misunderstanding of reality, call ‘inanimate objects’. This world is the immediate expression of, and the ‘state of awareness’ of, reality — from the entangled perspectives of what is Now.
That idea of reflectivity splits the naturing of this display into two parts and then asserts that one — the awareness of the other part — is not affected by it; yet both are one and only one activity of naturing all that appears. Of course it is affected by the appearances; they are the natural activity of this naturing. It doesn’t mean that this nondual reality is permanently affected by anything at all, as all that appears is impermanent.
Unlike awareness, a mirror is not cognizant of what is appearing in it. The opposite of “cognizant” would be “ignorant,” or “oblivious,” and even “unaffected by,” and that last antonym is exactly what this allegory seems to convey, and is touted for conveying — thus this allegory illustrates the very opposite of awareness’s essential character and confuses all that hear it and try to make sense of what is being said, by imposing a conceptual understanding in the place of a direct imperience of the truth!
Awareness is affected by what it cognizes; unlike a mirror that is “unaffected by” its reflections because it is not cognizant of them — awareness is cognizance in essence and has no other nature.
We are told that awareness is unaffected by what appears in a misleading effort to convey an important point about what is more properly called “pure presence” and this leads me to the first proof that awareness is affected by what appears:
Pure presence is directly known once cognizance of the Now — the Now that is pure presence — is recognized. This recognition is a breakthrough, and the cognizance that marks its arrival is necessarily called awareness. That is to say, the meta-cognitive state that accompanies the direct imperience of the presence that we normally refer to as Now, is nothing other than awareness of the naturing of the appearances arising in that moment of insight. It is pointed out in Dzogchen, for example, that once we become aware of the Now as nothing other than pure presence we are liberated. What is liberated? The cognizant aspect of our naturing — which is what we are referring to when we say “awareness.” This is what is liberated from our normal absorption in the appearances — our forgetting that which we truly are. So what are these appearances? They are the collection of reifications that we hypostatize into our “self” with all that identifies ourself, and to which we have an emotional (egoic) attachment to (i.e., our thoughts, feelings, emotions, sensations, and perceptions).
This reveals that awareness is affected by what appears. How is awareness affected? Three ways: by remaining attentive in approval; by turning away in disapproval; and by remaining neutral, or unattached, so that neither approval or disapproval arises. These two affective responses, and one neutral state, guide, or condition, what can appear next as the coherent natural display of reality.
The second proof that awareness is affected is more subtle, relying on a clarification of exactly how awareness cognizes.
Awareness is not something other than the “presencing” (i.e. naturing) of appearances in the pure presence of the Now. The Now is not a time, and Awareness is not some thing. Awareness is not part of a thing. It is not even an “aspect” of a process — it is the process.
Fortunately, the very word itself, with its “-ness” suffix, signals that it is a conceptual abstraction of some characteristic of something, and that is completely wrong in structure in this case — a dead-giveaway that confusion reigns.
First, there is no entity to have an aspect, and second, because abstracting awareness away, making it a thing-in-itself (which is the linguistic meaning of “-ness”) completely obfuscates that it is not only the essential character of a process, it is the only character of the process, thus it is the process — not some aspect of it.
This is why when awareness is said to be the “ground” of all that arises a subtle erroneous understanding also arises because it is confusing “knowing” for the unknowable “ground” that stands under (understands) the appearances. This may sound like a word game, but what it means is that we can not know the ground, but only the appearances — because the knowing is the appearances.
Effectively, abstracting awareness removes the natural process (from itself), confusing us into thinking that something substantive has been uncovered. And by giving that abstraction substance in our minds we are led directly away from the Truth.
In regard to “pure presence,” awareness corresponds to the arising activity of “presencing,” which is pointed out to us — our first pointing out instruction — as the “knowing” of appearances. Unfortunately, the concept of knowledge is completely dualistic today, so awareness becomes a subject entity and the appearances become an object entity. This very subtle dualism starts the confusion, which snowballs as we go forward.
Pure presence is not something to be known in a positive sense, and is only recognized via this naturing or presencing of appearances Now — the Now being the perspective that we call “self” and take as evidence of the reality of things, but which is not any thing.
Why? Because the essence of pure presence is that (it) is empty of any characteristics or identity, thus there is nothing intelligible at all about (it), and yet, (it) is the presencing of all that appears (note the deficiency of language with its need for a subject in this last group of statements). And it is this point which does not entail awareness in the sense that is normally meant when we use the word “presence” in conjunction with the appearances — what, after all, would there be cognizance of?
Is this Idealism? No. There is no “mind” that is “minding the store” here. No “mind” creating fantasies, nor realities. Certainly no “mind” that is aware. And yet the word “mind” is so often used; but not to denote any actual thing that can be pointed to — it’s used simply to point you away from your foot, brain, and everything in between.
Thus the “purity” that is pointed to is the unknowable ground, since nothing positive can be said (or known) about it — which most mystical religious traditions refer to as “Godhead.” We cannot know if it is a chimerical artifact of our reasoning when we say or understand “Godhead,” or if it is an absolute Truth.
What we may suddenly recognize, however, is the Now in which all appearances present — the appearances that are ephemeral and are void of any inherent self nature, but which are, however, evidential. That is, evidence that can lead us to recognize — when we suddenly notice the “clearing” of the Now (of pure presence) — that the Now is not a time, but is the venue of all that appears.
“Now” is never affected by what appears — what, after all, is there to affect? But “Awareness” is always affected by what is appearing because this abstraction points to the very essence of cognizance, and thus the very essence of the process of naturing, which is always responsive. Or more literally, awareness is the cognizing of appearances now, limiting and guiding the possibility of what can arise “next,” and this is the sum total of the process.
To conflate awareness with pure presence is a mental crutch that conflates knowing with the unknowable — expressing “facts” about that to which no facts apply. When recognized, the Now is known to be pure presence. But pure presence is not a thing — there is no entity in the naturing — so what could be stained by what appears as cognized?
Thus, the problem is that in making awareness something, in the allegory of the mirror, we subtly separate it from the naturing of all appearances — of which it is the only essential character. Then we find the need to prove that it is unaffected by what it cognizes because otherwise there is no “pure” state. Yet we know that the essence of this naturing is cognizance, and cognizance is not the “nature of the naturing of appearances.” Such a construction is mentation gone wild.
In reality there is no entity; so how could there be any entities in the appearances that arise? And these — appearances and reality — are not two things, so why do we make awareness into something that must be kept clean? Perhaps it is only a lack of recognition directly imperienced that provides the fertile soil for the genesis of this confusion.
And finally, if you are not yet convinced, let me ask you: “What do you think happens when you become conscious of something that you have perceived or thought? Where, exactly, is the location of the cognizance that you are trying to describe and how does it come to be?” For in each proposed solution, you will always already have cognizance implied in the structure of your answer, regardless of what you are pointing to.
Breaking The Mirror
Explaining How A Mirror Is Like Awareness In Order To Allow Us To See What The Problem Is In Our Common Understanding Of Awareness
In the preceding dialog, “Awareness Is Unlike A Mirror,” I presented a necessary and very apostate correction to an often used allegory — in order to break our minds free from the false understanding that we commonly have — regarding this abstract conception named “awareness.”
I pointed out that the Allegory of the Mirror, so often used in spiritual circles, creates an obstruction for us, both in our understanding, and more importantly, in our speech.
We all know, today, what “going viral” means, and how misinformation spreads like wildfire, while things that take more than a soundbite to transmit to someone else are met with the impatient and distracted inattention of those who are inundated with data from all quarters, and are unable to even attempt to attend to the explanation, let alone allow it to take root in their understanding so that it helps further their progress in comprehending the world and themselves.
Sharing this Allegory of the Mirror, spreads just such a misunderstanding — in today’s world — rather than the insight it was hoped it would, as I explained previously.
The point of this article is twofold: to explain how a mirror is like awareness — the opposite of that Allegory of the Mirror — in order to allow us to see what the problem is in our common understanding of “awareness,” and to help break us out of the common way of talking about “it.”
Part of the often stated reason for this allegory is to reinforce for meditators that their thoughts are not themselves, their feelings of fear, anger, and suffering are not themselves, and, indeed, even their feelings of being in love, being happy, exaltation, and bliss, are not themselves. But this is a basic use of the allegory to present the meaning of the direct meditative insight of the absence of an inherent self-nature in any phenomenon.
Later, in more esoteric “secret” doctrines, the point of this allegory is that awareness “itself,” being the ground of all being, is absolutely pure and unaffected by whatever appears; but again, the viral takeaway of the allegory is that “like a mirror, awareness is unaffected by what it reflects,” and this is a false understanding of our knowing presence that conflicts with the fully lived events that fill our lives.
When we are reflecting upon our consciousness of something, which is already an abstraction from our actual direct experience, because we are thinking about it after the fact, rather than living it in that moment, it appears that there is a subject and an object. This is because we put them there, either through the extruder of our understanding, which forces all of our directly lived imperiences to be structured (extruded) in such a way that they are coherent with our existing understanding, or more subtly, by our habitual perspective upon our direct experience as something that we are having, rather than something we are doing.
It is our understanding which places limitations on our comprehension — our so-called “worldview;” but it is our common reversed perspective upon what is happening that confuses us.
So this configuration of our experience is due to our fundamental misunderstanding of what “awareness” actually is referring to, because ultimately, our understanding is developed from the very beginning using that reversed perspective.
Awareness is a conceptual abstraction — nothing real in itself, because there is no self — there or anywhere else. But, then, what is it an abstraction of and how do we actually abstract it?
Well, we live a life filled with experiences which we are aware of having — that is, we are conscious and experiencing our lives; rather than being unconscious and experiencing nothing even though the world still carries on its activity. This is the difference that we call “being aware,” and from that state of being aware, we abstract, or cut out, the cognitive quality, for that is what it is, and we label it “awareness.”
We can go deeper into this process while in periods of deep meditation during which we can notice that there is a more fundamental level of imperience, which is the deeply felt presence of that which we perceive, think, emote, embody, remember, and intuit, arising as the processual unfolding of the phenomena in our experiences. Note that presence is different than meaning, or character, or even identification. Thus imperience does not contain those; but rather, is simply the felt presence that is the condition for the arising of the cognitive processing that occurs within our brain and nervous system.
These imperiences are then immediately apperceived into our understanding as experiences, i.e. identified content that is absorbed into the body of our understanding. We automatically fit these imperiences into our current understanding in a process that is called apperception.
If we cannot “make sense of them” then experiences are either ignored; beaten into an acceptable “shape” by recasting parts of them, or the whole thing, as something other than we first took them to be; or we label them a disease symptom — visual or auditory hallucinations, for example.
And then, once they have been apperceived, we may, or others may, abstract qualities from those experiences — and our “awareness” of our experiences is the one essential quality of an experience. But you can no more have awareness alone, than you can have a “Cheshire smile” without the cat.
This whole process of abstraction of qualities and positioning them as things-in-themselves is similar to factorization of mathematical terms in order to simplify the solution to a complex math problem. But unlike in mathematics, we don’t tend to “show our work” when we use these abstractions later in our thinking or communication, and these “things” take on a life of their own — at least in our understanding.
This is why “awareness” is such a problem — in particular, when it is presented as the “ground of all being.” As I have argued at length earlier in the Proem of this book, awareness is abstracted from that which — I argue — is more appropriately seen as the Now — the known presencing of all appearances.
But without a duration, “to be aware” is empty of meaning; and without the cognitive felt sense that is encapsulated in the concept of “awareness,” “duration” is meaningless. And this is very similar to the “wave-particle” duality problem found in quantum physics: To call something awareness, implies that it is other than time; to call something time, implies it is other than aware. But that which we are speaking about is neither — and in saying this, excluding the familiar ideas of duration and awareness, the conversation becomes incomprehensible, rather than just difficult.
This whole error arises because it has been created by our reversed, or more properly described, inverted, perspective imposed on our imperiences, so a better approach is to focus on that reversal.
A mirror reverses an image and re-presents it to us; “awareness” reverses the source of imperiences and re-presents them as sourced outside of our “awareness.”
Reflect on this: even the awareness of our self is reversed and re-presented to us as if we are an observer of ourselves — not only creating a subject-object split, but also dividing us into a mind and body.
Imperience is the precognition of our naturing — our foreknowledge of it. This precognition is not knowing that something is going to happen at a future point in time; but is rather only a primordial stacking of “knowing” before “perception,” “knowing” before “thinking,” and “knowing” before “feeling” (noticing) the presence of the imperience. Note here the structure of a knowing subject and a phenomenal object.
Thus imperience is “pre-” only in the sense of a perspective that is itself the stacking.
This perspective is our habitual way of “looking at things” and ordering them in our understanding. In deep meditative absorption, this perspective can be reversed — in the sense of undoing it — in a preternatural unstacking of the two events, which are now “seen” as one and the same event. This should be called “Breaking The Mirror”
Accomplishing this is sometimes called “transverberation,” or “religious ecstasy.” But it is not accomplished by “merging with the divine,” nor by seeking out blissful feelings. We are already (the) divine, and bliss is but a fleeting phenomena.
This state is only attained by breaking the mirroring effect of awareness, turning around our perspective, unstacking the knowing and the known subtle perspective in imperience, and simply abiding like space. You may only accomplish the state of transverberation once in your life — I have done so four times in my life — but once accomplished, “you” are changed forever. Holding that state is the supreme accomplishment — complete enlightenment. I have seen enough to know this.
It is our needing to understand what happened, when this state is achieved, that leads to the development of religious doctrines. And a religious doctrine is a very fragile flower, made more brittle when dogmatized. The Allegory of the Mirror is just such a brittle flower.
Thinking that “awareness” is something pure and unaffected by what appears “in” it, we reify a plethora of natures: the nature of time, the nature of space, the nature of awareness, the nature of appearances, and therefore, the natures of being, of having intrinsic natures, of not having inherent natures, and difference. The necessarily simple whole of reality suddenly bursts into an infinite plenum of things!
Given that the nature of awareness, as normally construed, requires an object, when the object is no longer there, awareness must also end. This leads to two important considerations:
No practice is entirely continuous,
So even mindfulness perforce arises and must halt.
An intermittent practice’s results are intermittent.
How could awareness guide all beings to enlightenment?¹
and:
Return just one of the perceiving faculties
Back to its source, and all six faculties will then be free.
For what we hear is mere illusion, like the objects of our vision —
Like what is seen by one whose eyes are covered by a film.
The Threefold Realm is like those flowers in an empty sky,
But turn the hearing inward, and the faculties are cured.
Their objects vanish, and awareness is completely pure.²
Note how the first quote points to the discontinuance of awareness in the intermittent absence of its object — in the case of a dualistic understanding — or the discontinuance of mindfulness in the case of a nondualistic understanding.
The second, as I will now point out, conflates awareness and the Now.
“Turning the hearing inward,” means turning our attention inwards towards the immanent presence that we all are.
It means reversing the perspective that places us as witness to that which is outside of us.
It means using these inner spontaneous sounds as guide posts to our actual naturing, of which these sounds are the telltale clues.
It means stopping the mind’s apperception — of identifying and recognizing, and fitting the pieces into our worldview storyline.
It means unstacking the subtle dualistic precognitive “knowing before” the imperiences, that underlie and condition all higher level apperception.
It means resting space-like (thus dwelling as the Now), realizing that anything happening is our own activity — our not being still — our attention not being quiescent. Just this.
And it means noticing, in the space-like stillness, what arises. And then realizing that any stirring is the spontaneous naturing that we call “mind,” which is not a thing, but activity.
What is apperceived is outside of all that, but all of it presences, and is natured Now. When imperiences are cleared of the stacking, the perspective is reversed (undone) and then condenses into the truth — that the venue is the surface of the phase space of possible coherent forms of time, like unique wavepatterns on an ocean, each with a sæculum that sets a bound on the “what it was to be” of each path through that ocean, which is the Whole — the innate wisdom of the Real.
“Presence” is immanent feeling (not “emotion;” but the “what it feels like to be” angry, happy, human, flower, dog, positron, water — any form at all).
“Naturing” is the enduring of felt presencing. But there is only naturing; not some “thing” natured, nor a Nature naturing — there can be no distinction made between maker and made at this level.
“Nature” when used as a noun should just be shorthand for pointing to the infinitive of the verb. “Natured” therefore is a misleading concept with no referent in actual truth, but only a fleeting glimpse upon, and of, the stage. The “natured” are the illusion, and the illusion is only possible if known, because presencing must be felt or it is nothing at all.
Reality can be described as a metaphorical “phase space” containing all the possible configurations of all the infinite forms — in the Ancient Greek sense of “womb,” the place of origin where everything is created and resides in potential. But nothing is created in Reality. There is no change. No difference. No self. And no ‘in’. What resides is Pure Presence, which has no self, nor greater Self, which has never been stained with ephemeral existence, which is the venue for all that appears and which alone is.
There is no where and no when, no sequence of clock ticks. What is, is a vignette — not a moment of time — chosen from infinite combinations of possibility, each a perspective upon the whole, the whole constrained to be coherent in every case, each with the “what is,” “why is,” and “what might be” (i.e., the “present” context) of a single coherent resonating “verse,” all present as, and only Now, which alone is the presencing of the whole, all at once, and total — not gradual, nor progressive, nor even regressive.
And every path becomes the same: a unique verse that is and never was not, branching out into an infinity of possibility, and each branch, becomes the same, a unique verse that is and never was not — and always Now.
“Becoming” is the liminal swap of one verse to another along the lines of coherent possibility and nothing more. Right now, this vignette of the Now is all that has ever been.
Footnotes:
¹ “The Śūraṅgama Sūtra,” Buddhist Text Translation Society, 2009, page 253
² Ibid. page 255
