What Is Awareness? (Awareness v Attention)

Your ability to stay centred in your awareness is going to be of up most importance if you are going to eliminate mental suffering from your life. If you have very little or no awareness of your minds pull, it can be difficult to understand that you can detach from the 'goings on' in your head and observe them from your awareness.

You are not your mind, you are not your thoughts and you are not your emotions. What you are is consciousness/awareness. Your mind is conditioned, all of your thought and beliefs have been learnt throughout the years. You were not born with anything that is causing you to suffer and the way to inner-peace is to bring awareness to the patterns of thought and the deluded beliefs that you are holding about yourself and about life so you can unidentify with them and allow them to fade away.

How will they fade away?

Anything that is not being fed with your mental attention/identification will start to lessen in intensity because it's food source (focus) which is the energy it needs to survive has been cut off. You can think of your attention as an electrical current that is providing a source of power to your thoughts and emotions. Once this source is no longer providing the fuel to keep your suffering running, it will begin to lessen in intensity and with time fade away.

How do I turn off my attention?

The difference between awareness and attention is that awareness is relaxed whereas attention is narrowed down on something specific. Awareness is passive but attention is active. While resting in awareness, thoughts of any nature could arise and they would be left to do so without placing your attention/focus on any one thing. You are aware of what is arising but not fixated on anything. The easiest way to differentiate between the two is by comparing them with our other senses; sight and hearing. Seeing and hearing something is similar to being aware in the way that the is no focus being placed on the external object (passive). Looking and listening is similar to attention in that there is a focus placed on the external object being looked at or listened to (active).

So if you can allow your unwanted thoughts and emotions to arise in your awareness without focusing your attention on them, just like you allow yourself to hear the noise of passing traffic and dogs barking without putting your attention on anything, they will begin to affect you less and less until they will have no affect at all.

This is not going to happen over night. It will take time for your awareness to strengthen. There is a good chance that you have very little awareness and are being pulled around by your mind all the time. If this is the case, you can spend time observing your mind in a quiet place without distraction. This will build awareness of your habitual patterns of thought. It is important that you get to know the inner workings of your mind so that you can detach yourself from these patterns and allow them to dissolve in your awareness.