Agony and Ecstasy

71
the slayer: I am Brahma. I am Shiva; because the world, as the ‘I’
sees it, cries out always “Thou art That” (tat tvam āsi).
But it is the thought which thinks so, which has separated itself
from its contents. Yet, there is no thought apart from thinking.
Consciousness has no existence of its own, Without being conscious.
Hence it is made up by its contents. Mind is made up by thoughts;
and thoughts are the reaction, the reflections, the memories, the
deductions of and from experiences. But, when an experience becomes
an object of thinking, the experience itself is no more, and
experiencing has now become an object of thinking about an experience.
Such thinking about the past is naturally and necessarily a
conditioned reflex, for the process of reflection takes place according
to an acquired temperament, acquired education, acquired environment,
intentional and volitional selection. Awareness therefore, can
only function immediately within the actual experience, which is
so immediately actual that there is no time-element of the past,
of memory, of reference, of comparison, of a separation within the
experiencing between the experiencer as the subject and the experienced
object. Thus awareness is a meditation and a contemplation,
while thought is a concentration with analysis and deduction, with
classification and registration, which make it possible to remember,
to recall, to relive an experience, which, however, is never the actual
experiencing which occurred in conscious awareness.
What is the difference between consciousness and awareness?
Consciousness is thought, and thought is the result of thinking,
which is a process of application of the mind with logic and memory,
with volition and determination, with judgement and selection, with
prejudice and ideals, with fear and hope. Consciousness, in other
words, is the ‘I’ in action, which is reaction, because all thinking
is the conditioned result of the entire past, not only the individual
past, but the accumulation throughout the ages of the struggles
for survival, the interminal wars for emergence, the endless conflicts
and strifes, with the ideas of the mind controlling the weapons of