Radical Hope #7: Our Identity as an Awareness
You are a body which thinks. You are nature.
You are developing your systems consciousness with practices that focus on what you feel, what you see, what you hear and what you smell and taste.
You are reading this right now.
Notice what you see, and if there are thoughts or an internal voice.
Pause
Listen to the sounds outside the window… inside the room… and inside your head.
Take a deep breath.
What do you feel in your body in the vast galaxy between your toes and your scalp?
Who or what is it that sees?
Who or what is it that hears?
Who or what is it that feels?
What is awareness?
Where is it located? How big or small is it?
Paying attention to awareness itself
This territory — the awareness that underlies all experience — is the deep structure of systems consciousness. Not a concept to hold, but a ground we inhabit.
This is the seventh blog in a series called From Generative Practice to Radical Hope. I am exploring why deep personal development — somatic, psychological, contemplative — is not a retreat from the polycrisis but the very ground from which genuine engagement becomes possible.
Last time we followed the quality of somatic listening out beyond our skin, into nature. The boundary between self and world became permeable. This week, we follow that thread to the source in which everything arises.
From attending to the senses to attending to awareness
Everything you know arrives in the field of awareness. Thoughts, feelings, sights, sounds, smells, tastes.
As you watch the field of awareness, notice that everything is changing.
Much of what you notice changes almost instantly, other phenomena persist for a while before changing. This present moment of awareness flows into the next moment.
Awareness is constant as change happens moment by moment.
Mystics from every tradition who embody the great mystery recognise that mystics from other traditions point toward the same territory, even when the maps look different. (1)
Why does this matter to us?
What pulls us out of systems consciousness into the separate self is either woundedness from the past, or anxiety about the future.
As we use our senses of seeing, hearing and feeling to bring us into the present moment, we can become so absorbed that we pop through a portal to a place where past and future cease to exist — a place where there is only this moment.
For a second, all the problems of our past and fantasies about what the future holds disappear, and we are simply immersed in what is happening right now. There is a peace here, a freedom here.
There may be an ache or pain in our body, but there isn’t a story about the feeling, and that makes such a difference.
For most of us, this other place lasts only a breath. Then past and future close back in, and the story of our lives reassembles itself.
Yet with repeated practice, repeated moments of this sort, we become familiar with this other reality. We discover how to return to this place.
When we have had a glimpse of this other dimension of life, we know this is a place in which we have peace, however difficult our everyday life.
This is incredibly important for any human being.
But in our time, when international law no longer operates, when nations compete for oil and natural resources, when countries are spending more on armaments and less on mitigating climate change, when climate catastrophe will affect everyone and millions will die, when mass extinction of species is destabilising the ecosystem, having this safe place of peace is even more important. (2,3)
This eternal moment gives us the inner refuge to keep stepping forward in radical hope.
My own journey
The flamboyant (and egotistical) part of me wants to tell you about some great mystical experience that will impress you — but that is old “separate self” thinking. There is nothing wrong with the ego, but it is helpful when it applies itself where it is genuinely useful.
A deeper truth is the commitment to a day-in-day-out return to presence: those moments when my inner voice stops talking for a second, when I lean into what a Christian mystic called “The Cloud of Unknowing”. (4)
Return again and again to the eternal moment
In awareness we can observe all our thoughts, feelings, and other phenomena rising, staying a while, and changing.
Awareness can be compared to a mirror: everything gets reflected in the mirror, but the mirror itself never changes. (5)
Sometimes we notice tightness or pain in our body, perhaps an emotion, and we are able to watch it, let it stay a while, and let it change. Sometimes the feeling is strong and persistent, and then we need to attend to it with compassion. We will discuss this in Newsletter 8: Your Inner Coherence Changes the Field.
Returning home throughout the day
As I go about my day, like a child learning to walk, I lose my balance and then find it again. I fall in and out of centredness. Even an adult leans out of balance to take a step forward before finding the ground again.
I spin out on some delicious, entertaining or anxious thought — and then come home again to the awareness in which all these things arise.
Keep coming back to the ground of being.
Of course, awareness is never not here. It is present whether noticed or not.
If I am a wave on the ocean of existence, I rise, I foam and I die. If I am the ocean itself, I never die.
Awareness is slowly, slowly becoming more of my sense of identity.
The amazing thing about awareness is that it can go anywhere: it can attend to my ego to carry out tasks, luxuriate in the body, have me identify with a community, with nature, or return simply to its own essential nature. I am an individual. I am a body. I am my community. I am the world. I am nature. I am spirit. I am awareness. Mystics have said: I am God/Brahman. (6) God is everywhere. (7)
Feel free to pause and add statements of your own.
There seem to be two realities
Absolute reality — everything is one, flowing from moment to moment. Relative reality — I am an individual, living in a world of happiness and sadness, success and failure, cause and effect.
Absolute and relative reality are like two wings of a bird. We need both to fly.
My Buddhist teacher for twenty years, Shenphen Dawa Rinpoche, left Tibet during the Cultural Revolution with his father Dudjom Rinpoche, a renowned master. Many yogis came with them who would sit in the garden watching the sky, dissolving themselves into it day and night. So absorbed in absolute reality were they that my teacher, a kid at the time, would try to disturb them by climbing onto them — and they wouldn’t flinch. For them, everything was simply phenomena arising and disappearing. They didn’t know when to eat. He would bring them bowls of food and say: ‘Eat.’
So we need to learn to be caught neither in the difficulties of everyday life nor in the mystical state beyond cause and effect.
We need both wings of the bird
We need to find ourselves before we can fully let go of the separate self. We need to know our boundaries — the limits of our body, our time, our energy.
Only when we take care of the local subsystem, our own body, can we meaningfully contribute to the larger system.
Yet to be at peace with ourselves we need to open our hearts — and if we open our hearts, our hearts are open to humanity.
The Mahāyāna Buddhist tradition tells us why this matters. If all suffering comes from clinging to the illusion of a separate self, then pursuing awakening for oneself alone only deepens that illusion. As Śāntideva put it:
“All those who suffer in the world do so because of their desire for their own happiness. All those happy in the world are so because of their desire for the happiness of others.” (8)
It is only by seeking awakening for all beings — oneself included — that the grip of ego loosens, and we begin to inhabit systems consciousness more fully.
Every tradition carries its own version of this. As Jesus said: “Love your neighbour as yourself.” (9)
A Practice
Take time six days a week — six days a week because it builds consistency while preserving a built-in margin for the stuff of life. (10)
Even a short amount of time establishes the habit.
Meditate with your senses to bring you present, or whatever your usual meditation ritual is, and then watch the field of awareness rather than the things arising within it
If you like, use the enquiry: “What’s it like being the field in which everything arises?”
You can repeat this question at intervals to bring your attention back to the enquiry any time you like.
Have you ever had a moment — however brief — when the sense of being a separate self managing a separate world softened? What was that like?
Have you ever noticed how your own moments of peace and healing contribute to the peace and healing of the world?
If something has resonated, or troubled you, do write to me: julian.russell@lifetalent.com. Also write to me if you want to join our WhatsApp and participate in the discussion.
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In hope and love
Julian
Julian Russell is a psychotherapist, executive coach, writer, and committed fellow traveller through the territories of inner work and public life. Drawing on decades of somatic and contemplative practice, he helps people access the capacities they already carry.
Notes
1 Mystics from every tradition who embody the great mystery recognise that mystics from other traditions point toward the same territory, even when the maps look different. Non-dual awareness — the direct experience of existence as a single arising phenomenon — has different names depending on the tradition you come from. In Buddhism it is rigpa, or Buddha-nature; in contemplative Christianity it is the cloud of unknowing, the surrender of all concepts and images into bare awareness; in Advaita Hinduism it is the recognition that Atman and Brahman are one; in mystical Islam it is the dissolving of the separate self; in Jewish Kabbalah it is Ein Sof, the infinite, indivisible source, with Hasidic teachings pointing to the sacred as present everywhere and in everything; in Taoism it is the undivided source from which all action flows.
The traditions are genuinely different at the level of doctrine, ritual, culture and archetypal forms. But the mystics themselves who have realised this mystery recognise this revelation in other mystics, irrespective of their tradition. The medieval Muslim mystic Ibn ‘Arabī and the medieval Christian mystic Meister Eckhart made the same claim: that the soul and the divine are not ultimately two. The Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu agreed that the deepest states of contemplative experience are not owned by any religion; they arise from the nature of being human. The central practice of advanced mystical Buddhism is simply attending to awareness itself. The central practice of mystical Christianity is to abandon any practice and surrender to the realm of unknowing. In both, you have to enter the cloud of forgetting — let go of preconceived concepts, theologies, and ideas — and lean into awareness itself.
Sophie and I, coming from two different traditions, would sit side by side and meditate together. Some of our private prayers were informed by our respective lineages, but the main emphasis was being together in the open space of unknowing. Forced by love to rise above theology, we met in the luminous presence evoked by our meditation, supported by grace, an alignment of the known and unknown.
Jorge Ferrer suggests the image of one ocean, many shores. The shores are genuinely different. The water is the same. Jorge Ferrer, Revisioning Transpersonal Theory: A Participatory Vision of Human Spirituality (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002).
This is why the structures of all the spiritual traditions are like fingers pointing at the moon. To start with we need to look at the finger to see where it is pointing. But eventually we need to turn to look directly at the moon. To paraphrase Laozi: the theology that is called the one-and-only truth is not the eternal mystery.
Carmen Acevedo Butcher, trans., The Cloud of Unknowing (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 2009).
His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, with Douglas Abrams, The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World (New York: Avery, 2016). The observation that deep contemplative states belong to no single religion runs throughout their dialogue, particularly in the sections on meditation and the nature of joy.
2 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report (Geneva: IPCC, 2023), https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/
3 Luke Kemp, Chi Xu, Joanna Depledge, et al., “Climate Endgame: Exploring Catastrophic Climate Change Scenarios,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119, no. 34 (2022), https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2108146119
4 Carmen Acevedo Butcher, trans., The Cloud of Unknowing (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 2009), https://www.shambhala.com/the-cloud-of-unknowing-9781590306222/
5 I find this metaphor useful, but my colleague Judith Puckmayr points out that this risks objectifying awareness as a thing. The concept of awareness can also be dissolved into luminous emptiness.
6 Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 1.4.10, in Patrick Olivelle, trans., The Early Upaniṣads: Annotated Text and Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
7 Psalm 139:7–10 affirms divine omnipresence (“Where can I go from your Spirit?”), while classical Jewish theology grounds omnipresence in the Shema (“the Lord is One,” Deut. 6:4) and in the doctrine of hashgachah (Divine Providence), which teaches that God’s presence permeates all creation. See The Jewish Study Bible, 2nd ed., ed. Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
8 Śāntideva, The Bodhicaryāvatāra, trans. Kate Crosby and Andrew Skilton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 8.129 (p. 99); wording as cited in Charles Goodman, “Śāntideva,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2016).
9 Mark 12:31 (New Jerusalem Bible, London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1985). Jesus is here quoting Leviticus 19:18.
10 James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones (New York: Avery, 2018).