We can say that in our Essence we are pure awareness, but of course when we come to this pure awareness we can’t say it’s my awareness. It’s simply awareness. Pure awareness manifests when the personal disappears. It’s an absence of somebody. We sink down deeper inside and we come to pure awareness, which we could also call Being.

        Before we come to this pure awareness we will have an experience of awareness. In this experience I’m being aware. I am aware of it being night time and dark outside. I am aware of the world, and so on. This awareness is not like concentration. It doesn’t effect what I’m observing. There is a me observing something, aware of something. I can be equally aware of the inside – feelings, thoughts, bodily sensation. All this kind of awareness is bringing us towards our own Being.

       In this way we use the mind to become the witness of both our inner and outer worlds. Initially, somebody is being the witness, but in the moment of Self-realisation the connection to the personal melts away and leaves pure awareness or pure witnessing. There is a melting together of what is being witnessed with the one who is doing the witnessing. We call this merging Self-realisation.

        It’s not so easy to be self-aware, to be present, and only you can know what your pace is. Almost for sure in the beginning you have to move slowly. I remember one of Osho’s many stories. When he was a university student he used to walk around with wooden shoes, and on the stone floors these shoes would go, ‘tap tap tap’, probably driving everyone crazy, but he did it consciously; he chose to do that because he used the sound of those shoes to keep himself aware. He didn’t want to be robotic, unconscious. He chose that device for bringing him to presence.