Awareness is Not a State

Awareness is not a state. It is that on which states appear. You cannot experience awareness itself because you are awareness, yet everything you experience is in awareness.

The beauty of awareness not being a state, is that you cannot loose it. In fact, you have never been without it. You don't have to do anything to have it, it is already yours.

The reflection of enlightenment in awareness, however, may change what is experienced. An enlightened mind may experience life differently: the absence of suffering, or less frustration with the way things are. 

When one first gets a glimpse of oneness, the mind may feel an overwhelming bliss, or ecstasy, but bliss will not last. It is a great experience, but it is not permanent, and it is not enlightenment. When it goes, one may be rather dismayed, yet if one can take the experience as a pointer, it may lead to the understanding that is enlightenment.

With or without that blissful experience, you are awareness. Enlightened or not, you are awareness. You can't feel awareness directly. It is a potentiality, a constant, eternal readiness for experience.

Awareness is the foundation, the potentiality, for knowing, for experiencing, any and all things - however gross or subtle. It is the field in which interpretations of experience are labeled good or bad.

Enlightenment then, if not a state, can be nothing but understanding - understanding of the fact of non-duality. Those who understand we call enlightened. Yet all, with or without understanding, are awareness, and are standing in non-duality.

Experience is experience, it does not necessarily translate into knowledge. And it is knowledge that is required for enlightenment. Enlightenment is not getting something you didn't have, it is the realization that you are that - eternal awareness, waiting, ready for anything.

In enlightenment, you realize that the ordinary is okay. You do not need what is not in the world, you know that whatever is out there, or not out there, does not affect you. Your happiness is not out there, and seeking for self has ended.