Awareness in Buddhist Meditation

Awareness,
the Beginning of
Enlightenment
Awakening Begins with Awareness
The world in which we move live and think is indeed but a world
of actuality, in which we react to the environment as mechanically
and unintelligently as in a dream. Here too, our actions are conditioned
by reflexes, subject to the influence of the past, of memory,
of attachment and repulsion, of love and hate, of the senses and
their contacts, tradition and education, hopes and fears. In short,
it is the world of ‘self’, in which we move with self as aim, in which
we live with self as the centre, in which we think with self as the
subject, the thinker. This world of actuality is then only a world of
reaction, for it is seen only with reference to the ‘self’.
In this reaction there is constant comparing, judging, selecting,
choosing, willing, retaining, absorbing, prospecting projecting,
which has only one reference, the ‘self’. It is in this context that love
so easily turns to hate, that memories are cherished as ideals building
up the future. And all this reaction is necessary to maintain the
illusion of a self as separate from its activity.
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