Awareness in Buddhist Meditation

Awareness in Reaction
Methods
How can one be aware?
This question can be a good starting point, as long as it does
not involve a question about a methodical approach. The search for
a method of approach presumes a general knowledge of the outcome
of the search. Even a search for truth, or a search for God involves
some idea of what truth is, some concept of God. Such knowledge
may be extremely vague, as that of the man who fell in love with the
most beautiful woman in the world. He had never left his country
and he had certainly not met all the women in the world to compare
and suit his requirements. But he would have had some concept of
feminine beauty in the abstract, classical features, shapely contours,
colour of hair, deportment. All such abstractions, however, exist
only in the mind, and in an individual concept. It would, therefore,
be only his own concept that he had fallen in love with. He was in
love with himself.
Now the question: ‘How to be aware?’, may be such a search
for the ideal of awareness, an ideal one has formed after hearing
much what has been said about the value of awareness in Buddhist
meditation, the value of insight meditation, of contemplation, of
seeing things as they are. And the mind begins a search for this
kind of meditation in order to achieve awareness, in order to acquire
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