A good friend just asked me last night by voice mail: What’s the difference between consciousness, awareness, and mindfulness? By the time I heard the message, it was late and I was on the verge of losing my grip on each of those things. So I’ve waited until this morning. You all want to take a crack at this one? My first thoughts are that consciousness is the base level of what we all experience except when we’re sitting through a long and boring lecture in a warm room. It separates people and animals from plants, maybe, or all three from stones, maybe. Or. It’s an awake visual surround sound sensorium of perceptions, memories, and thoughts, whenever they’re present, and lively, or “brought to mind.” We all know what the opposite is like, to be unconscious, except of course while it’s going on, which is odd in its own right, right? And then there’s the subconscious that takes over and drives your car in way that Tesla software can't when your conscious mind decides to take a break and wander in warm trustingness that this other part of you can make do just fine, most of the time, unlike Tesla's CEO.
Awareness is just another name for what distinguishes consciousness from the totally oblivious unconscious, or what strangely attaches both conscious and subconscious states to a greater reality beyond the individual mind. It can take such forms as the immediacy of sharp visual seeing or keen concurrent hearing, or else the indirectness of merely realizing.
Mindfulness is by contrast a particular focus of the conscious, aware mind. It’s about paying attention and keenly noticing in an undivided and nondistracted way. It’s a purity of being there, or here, and now. It’s a spiritual attainment, whereas consciousness and awareness at least begin as among our most basic, given equipment, our starting points for active participation in the world. I may be wrong, but I’m not yet conscious, or aware, of how, and yet I’m mindfully open. You?
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