You are aware. A sort of light pervades you. Sometimes it is the sight of actual vision. Sometimes the light is a metaphor for sound or the other senses, or for thought, dreams, emotion or just the sense of being here. So different in form and event and even more diverse in content, these experiences do share a common center; they are all encountered in awareness.
What is this which we call awareness and why do we give it that name? These two questions have very different sorts of answers. The first question, of the nature of awareness, has both a subtle and perhaps unanswerable intrinsic part and an outer shell of explanation which can describe the characteristics with which awareness presents itself to being. The second question is a matter of words and although it cannot be exactly answered it can be delineated by a comparison of related words in the English language.
We have used awareness as the fundamental term, where we might conceivably have used the alternatives of ‘consciousness’ or ‘experience’. But we use awareness because it is sparser than the others. ‘Consciousness’ has been weighted since Freud by the concept, and more especially the name, of the ‘unconscious’ which denotes something which may be a partial cause of but not necessarily a direct part of our awareness . ‘Experience’ presents two problems. For one, it generally commits us, due to the history of philosophy, to be categorized as empiricist; while this has partial validity, that is only partial; let the full content of the writing determine to what degree empirical may be placed upon it. For another reason, perhaps particular to the English vernacular, experience connotes a meaning related to one’s personal life history, as distinguished from that of others by one’s age and the sequence of events which one has undergone, with also an overtone, perhaps, of what one has learned from those events. We need a more general concept.
We need the sparser term awareness. None of the aspects of consciousness or experience mentioned above are to be excluded from awareness but the most general concept of awareness must not be limited or circumscribed by them. However, even awareness also has an English connotation which may distort our meaning. It is sometimes used to specify some sort of higher or mystical perception or alternatively to imply a relatively higher intelligence than normal; again, neither of these ideas is meant to be excluded from possibility but neither is our use of awareness intended to be limited by them. Upon reflection, awareness seems to be the best word available to name our fundamental meaning.