I. Foundation
We now know two things with certainty.
I. Experience is happening.
II. AWARENESS IS.
This raises immediate questions.
What is this Awareness?
Same bar. Whatever we find MUST be undeniably true; immune to any counterargument, present without exception.
II. Awareness Is Prior To Experience
We established that experience is happening and that we know this because we are aware of it.
We then explored the opposite, what about when experience is not happening, and here too, to know of non-experience requires awareness.
Thus everything known is known within awareness.
Every thought. Every sensation. Every object. Every experience. Every brain, every process, every field, happens within awareness.
Thus Awareness must be prior to experience and non-experience both.
III. Awareness Is Prior To All Knowing
To know anything — a fact, an object, a sensation, a thought — is first to be aware of it on some level.
Every chain of reasoning, every scientific discovery, every verified truth — requires awareness for the knowing to be possible.
The equation is grasped in awareness. The experiment is observed in awareness. The conclusion is reached in awareness.
There is no knowing that precedes awareness.
Awareness must be prior to all knowing.
IV. Awareness Must Be Unchanging
Everything known is in constant change.
Thoughts arise and dissolve. The body ages. Moods shift like weather. Every experience, every piece of knowledge is a continuous stream of change.
Does the knowing that illuminates a sad thought feel different from the knowing that illuminates a happy one?
It does not.
If awareness changed between moments — the knowing of that change, and the knowing that connects one moment to the next, would itself require an awareness present for both moments. You cannot use episodic awareness to explain the knowing of its own episodes.
Change is the movie. Awareness is the screen. The screen does not turn into water when the movie shows a flood.
Awareness must be unchanging. Change happens within it. It does not change.
V. Awareness Must Be Undivided
Every division and distinction we know — inside and outside, here and there, subject and object, this color and that one — is known within awareness.
Two sides require something that knows both sides. Every distinction requires something that identifies the difference.
Awareness cannot be divided by the very divisions it makes possible.
Awareness must be undivided. One pure awareness.
VI. There Is Nothing Outside Of Awareness
We usually treat awareness as something we have — like a tool, a faculty, a feature of the mind.
Let’s test that.
Try to find a border where awareness ends and the world begins. To find that border, you would have to be aware of the other side of it.
There is no other side.
Awareness has no outside. You are steeped, soaked, saturated in it.
Trying to observe awareness from the outside is like a wave trying to step out of the ocean to see what water looks like. You cannot — because you are a modulation of the very thing you are seeking.
And if someone were to step outside of awareness — how would anyone know? The knowing of it would require awareness. It is an impossibility.
There is nothing outside of awareness.
VII. Awareness is Self-Illuminating
Everything known requires awareness to be known. It borrows its reality from awareness.
If awareness itself required something outside to be known — a second awareness, another light — that something would itself need to be known. An infinite regress with no ground.
But this is not the case.
Awareness is aware of awareness, it is self-aware.
It knows itself. It is self-reflective. Its existence depends on nothing outside itself.
Awareness is self-illuminating. It does not borrow its reality from anything.
VIII. Awareness Must Be Primary
Prior to experience and non-experience.
Prior to all knowing.
Unchanging.
Undivided.
Nothing outside of it.
Self-illuminating.
Everything depends on it. It depends on nothing.
Awareness must be primary.
IX. What We Now Know
What do we know with 100% certainty?
Experience is happening.
AWARENESS IS PRIMARY.
Next Inquiry: Awareness is primary — undivided, unchanging, with nothing outside of it. And yet here is a world of divisions. A self. Objects. Thoughts. Other people. How does the undivided become divided? How does awareness become the experience of a life?