“An Introduction to Awareness” presents the view of Reality known as Indefinite Monism. This is a philosophical conception of Reality that asserts that only Awareness is real and that the whole of Reality can be conceptually thought of in terms of immanent and transcendent aspects of Awareness. In this system Awareness is not equivalent to consciousness, rather it is the immanent aspect of Awareness that is the venue for consciousness, and the transcendent aspect of Reality – the existents of the world all around us – is what consciousness is of.  

In this system what is real is distinguished from that which exists by showing that everything that we are conscious of exists but is not real since it is contingent upon awareness for its existence.

In contrast to those who hold that only the physical is real, this book shows us that it is transcendent Awareness that is the physical – the physical structures of the brain that Awareness is, the neurons and the chemical and electrical signaling between synapses that Awareness is, the nerve impulses that accompany the physical brushing of a hand across a surface, that hand and that surface, all of which Awareness is.  Awareness is not only the tree that bows in the wind, it is the wind, and it is the bowing.  It is the Sun pouring its heart out. Awareness is the source of its own energetic display – its omneity.  It is all these things, and the form of all of these can be perceived and described mathematically by us, yet possibly never understood, because such understanding requires a different practice.

Rather than leading to a solipsistic account of reality in which we are each lost in our own inner world separate from each other, it is shown through an analysis of consciousness that it is an error on our part to conceive of Awareness as being individuated.  We make that error because we conflate the objects of consciousness with the subject of consciousness – that which has the consciousness – within the pre-cognitive view of a materialist form of reality consisting of separate physical things.  

Proceeding from the one necessarily true and unquestionable fact – that we are present to our experiences – a new understanding of reality is developed that is neither a materialist nor an idealist conceptualization.

One of the strongest arguments against the admission of anything beyond the purely physical as a fundamental aspect of Reality is that Science is so effective in bending the world to human desires and it seems to require reality to be completely mechanistic and material. Yet, among the many problems that Science has not been able to explain is how it is that we are present as an awareness of all that we perceive, feel, and think. It is even at a loss to explain how the intuitive insights that drive scientific discovery arise.  

We are surrounded by the wisdom of our ancestors, whether mystical in origin, insightful in nature, or blissful in practice, written down in innumerable books that are cherished by many different traditions. They all tell us the same thing: Reality is non-dual wholeness that encompasses both awareness and being as one. Yet, it is hard for us to see how this can be so. Not understanding that the purpose of these writings was directed to a different kind of understanding than objective science encompasses, these books are subjected to critical doubts by those who raise scientific objections to their ideas. Thus the wisdom of these books remains trapped in another time and other cultures, and we struggle to find our own understanding of a Reality that we can hardly even comprehend anymore.

Whatever helps us to find that understanding, whatever makes us fertile ground for insight, benefits us. This book has a single purpose: to expediently loosen the hold that the Physicalist view of a reality of separate things hanging in a void like Christmas ornaments, absent any affective presence such as you and I are, has on our thinking – blocking our ability to realize Reality as it truly is. This book does this by showing how the view of Physicalism arises, pointing out the specific errors that are made when we judge Reality to be different than it is. It shows the perniciousness of that view and how it undermines those who seek both spiritual and intellectual insight. Then it points to what Reality truly is, confirming the perennial wisdom of our ancestors, but in terms of our own language today. And it shows how Science and mystical experience are both equally possible when we have a direct insight of that true nature. How the physical and the spiritual are not two things, as we see them today.

It is not an easy thing to change how one views the world. It is, in fact, a very difficult thing to do – we cannot just think about it – yet each of us can accomplish the necessary insight if we till the ground of both our heart and our mind together, ignoring neither, making our whole being fertile for understanding to arise. This book shows how to change how we view the world and each other in order to realize the wholeness of Reality, while retaining the skillful means that the modern world has given us.

So we are left with three intuitive faculties: that which enables us to know first principles in scientific and mathematical inquiries by somehow being able to grasp the heart of a matter, or to make a leap from one stage of knowledge to another, whether it be practical knowledge or scientific knowledge; that which enables us to ratiocinate; and that which enables us to make judgments. The first implies an awareness of our intellectual reasoning as well as our goal or ‘line’ of reasoning, and supplies us with the big leaps found in scientific and mathematical intuitions. As well there are the micro-intuitions that effectuate a bridging of the myriad little steps of ratiocination that take place in our reasoning. This shows an awareness of our experiential perceptions and our desired goals, enabling us to act quicker and more effectively than ratiocination, with its otherwise impossible algorithmic and heuristic processes, would be capable of alone. The third shows an awareness of our desires as well as our moral sentiments, and provides us with the result that best matches both. The similarity of these faculties is that they are each forms of an active awareness that is not just a passive sense or faculty, but which is the motivating or directing force behind our acts. And these three forms of active awareness, when reflected upon together, take on the appearance not of individual and separate faculties, but one faculty that is omnipresent within the context of our ‘selves’, and which can focus upon the different spheres of human experience, deliberation, and willful intent. In short it can “pay attention” to each and every facet that lays before it. We perceive them as separate faculties because of our habitual application of dichotomization, basing a distinction upon the separate fields in which intuitive awareness participates. This sense is clearly transcendent to our reasoning about the world, our actions, goals, desires, and moral sentiments. We rely upon it for our apodictic ideas.

The greatest danger facing humanity today, I believe, is the application of the idea of Mechanism as an explanatory device for all of reality and especially of Human life. By focusing in this way on the natural unfolding of existence and treating it as if it were nothing more than the progression from one steady state of a purely mechanical process to another steady state, we are robbing ourselves of that which makes our lives the precious opportunity for our full development as living, knowing-beings – our experience of this unfolding and the power that each of us has to make our way in the world, and through that, to come to an understanding about the source of all that we experience, including that which is most intimate for us – our selves.