Readings & Reflections · No. 1
Awareness and Consciousness
March 2026 — from I Am That, Nisargadatta Maharaj
Awareness is primordial; it is the original state, beginningless, endless, uncaused, unsupported, without parts, without change. Consciousness is on contact, a reflection against a surface, a state of duality. There can be no consciousness without awareness, but there can be awareness without consciousness, as in deep sleep. Awareness is absolute, consciousness is relative to its content; consciousness is always of something. Consciousness is partial and changeful, awareness is total, changeless, calm and silent. And it is the common matrix of every experience.
— Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That (1973), trans. Maurice Frydman
The distinction Nisargadatta draws here is one I've returned to more than almost any other. It does something that most philosophical distinctions don't: it places you, immediately, in a different relationship to your own experience.
Read it again: there can be awareness without consciousness, as in deep sleep.
At first this looks like a claim about sleep states — slightly interesting, mainly technical. But follow the implication. If awareness can exist without any content — without any object of experience — then what awareness is cannot be a kind of knowing. It precedes knowing. It is the condition in which knowing becomes possible.
Consciousness, in this framing, is always relational. It requires a surface to reflect against. You are conscious of something: a thought, a sensation, the weight of a decision, the blue of the sky. That "of" is the signature of duality — a subject encountering an object. Consciousness is where the separation lives.
Awareness doesn't have an "of." It isn't conscious of itself. It simply is.
What I find disorienting — in the productive sense — is this: the awareness Nisargadatta is pointing at isn't an achievement or a state to enter. It's described as the "common matrix of every experience." That means it's already present in this moment, in every moment, including the moments when you feel most contracted, most identified, most trapped in the story of a self. The matrix doesn't disappear when the movie gets intense.
I notice I want to find this reassuring. But the passage doesn't quite offer reassurance — it offers something stranger. It suggests that whatever you are looking for as liberation is already what's looking. That the search is happening inside what is being sought.
There's a particular quality of attention that arises when I stay with this. Not understanding, exactly — more like the mind pausing at the edge of something it cannot fit itself into. That pause feels significant. Not because it means anything. Because it isn't of anything.
Maybe that's the opening. Not insight — just the gap before the next thought closes it.