Last night I had an interesting conversation that centered on awareness. I can’t express how rare that is. I found myself referring to my forty-plus blog posts as a repository of all my thoughts on the topic, knowing that nobody is going read those posts. So I uploaded the posts to ChatGPT and asked for ten key take-aways (PDF).

“Would you like to have these in an essay format that could be posted to your blog?”, asked ChatGPT. The resulting essay so accurately captures my thinking on this topic I’ve decided share it here. Everything below was written by ChatGPT:

Noticing What It Feels Like to Notice

Awareness has been a recurring theme in my writing for years, scattered through books I’ve read, conversations with AI, and metaphors that bubble up in daily life. If there’s a thread tying these reflections together, it’s the attempt to articulate something that resists being pinned down: that background presence in which thoughts, memories, and sensations come and go. Looking back at the posts I’ve tagged awareness, I see not a set of conclusions but a landscape of attempts, failures, and occasional glimpses of clarity.

One of the strongest impressions is that awareness isn’t the same thing as thought. Thoughts come and go like balloons, bubbles, or scenes outside a train window, but awareness is the space in which they appear. This space is quiet, neutral, and doesn’t add commentary of its own. It doesn’t resist, grasp, or explain — it simply notices. Seeing this distinction even for a moment can shift the whole flavor of experience. That shift often brings with it a dissolving of the “I.” Many of my posts circle the idea that the self is a story told by memory and identification, not a solid thing. This realization is both unsettling and freeing. The “me” who claims authorship of thoughts may not actually exist; thoughts seem to think themselves, rising up from somewhere untraceable, arranging themselves like magnetic poetry on the refrigerator door of consciousness.

Because the terrain is so slippery, I find myself reaching for metaphors. Bubbles drifting from the canyon floor, balloons on a balcony, a red button and a green button, rivers and Taoist currents — these images give form to what can’t be nailed down. They remind me that awareness isn’t about grasping an idea but watching what arises without clinging. Even fear and anxiety lose their sharp edges when seen this way, as if they were just another cluster of balloons floating by. This watching has practical consequences. When I stop identifying with every thought that passes through, suffering lightens. It isn’t the circumstances themselves but the grasping that amplifies them into distress. Awareness is the brief pause that allows me to choose whether or not to push the red button of anger or fear. Even fleeting moments of that pause feel like freedom.

The nondual teachings I’ve gravitated toward extend this insight beyond the personal. Awareness, in this view, is not confined to my head but is continuous with the universe itself. I’m not a separate observer watching the world but an expression of the same field that produces stars, rivers, and trees. Alan Watts, Sam Harris, Robert Wolfe, and others give language to this intuition: that the knower and the known are not two. Books have been faithful companions in this exploration. From Tolle’s A New Earth to McCarthy’s “The Kekulé Problem,” I’ve leaned on other writers to help me articulate what I sense but cannot define. Each one offers a phrase or metaphor that becomes another stepping stone across the stream. Often I don’t adopt their conclusions so much as use their words to remind me of something I already half-knew.

Awareness, though, isn’t just a topic for books and blog posts. It’s also a practice — or maybe better, a mode of being. Meditation plays its role, but just as often awareness shows up in the middle of ordinary life: noticing a stranger on High Street, the sound of a train slowing on its tracks, or the sight of soap bubbles drifting into the canyon air. These small interruptions in the autopilot of thought are where the rubber meets the road.

Time, too, comes under scrutiny. Posts about reincarnation, death, and continuity of consciousness ask whether awareness has any beginning or end. Is it a flicker in one lifetime, or a constant that threads through them all? While I don’t land on answers, I find comfort in imagining awareness as timeless — something that holds both the fear of birth and the mystery of death without being diminished by either.

And throughout, awareness shows itself as an antidote to ego and cultural conditioning. Politics, advertising, religion — all depend on people being hypnotized by stories of identity and desire. Awareness offers a way to step back, even briefly, from those narratives and see them for what they are: just more thoughts floating in the field.

Looking back, I don’t see a single definition of awareness so much as a constellation of attempts to notice what it feels like to notice. Sometimes the metaphors click, sometimes they don’t, but the exercise itself is the point. The value isn’t in nailing down what awareness is but in glimpsing it directly — the quiet background in which life unfolds, unowned and ungraspable, yet always present.