Awareness and Consciousness

Consciousness and awareness are the same when awareness is totally identified with and attached to that which it is aware of. To separate the two is the artful practice of yoga.

How to strike the balance between living 2/3rd internally in our day to day life and 1/3rd externally? Regulate the breath throughout the day. Keep the spine always straight. Always sit up straight. As soon as the spine is bent, awareness is externalized. We are living two-thirds in the external area of the mind and only one-third within. As soon as the spine is straight, our awareness is internalized. We are living two-thirds within and only one-third out.

This is what differentiates a normal man from a mystic, a mystic lives 2/3rd within.

Now, if we are sitting in a movie, and we are realizing that we are going through moods and emotions but we are not the moods and emotions that we are going through -- all we are doing is being entertained by our senses -- then that's the mystic. He is enjoying life and what life has to offer. He is even remembering in past lives when he had similar experiences that the players are portraying on the screen, and he has empathy with them. He is living a full and a vibrant life, and yet when he walks out of the movie house, or walks away from the TV, he has forgotten the whole thing. He doesn't carry it with him. His awareness is immediately right where he is currently. That's the power of the great eternity of the moment.

It will help for us to make a mental picture. Let us now try to visualize awareness as a round, white ball of light, like one single eye. This ball is being propelled through many areas of the mind, inner and outer, and it is registering all the various pictures. It has, in fact, four eyes, one on each side of it. It is not reacting. The reaction comes when awareness is aware of the astral body and the physical body. It is in those bodies that reaction occurs. We are aware of the reactions in these bodies, for the physical body and the astral body are also part of the vast, vast universe of the mind.