The Integration of Experience, Awareness, & Consciousness into the Relational-Matrix Model II: Consciousness and the Awareness of Experience

Abstract

We have demonstrated how seemingly separate experiential realities can come to exist within the context of an ultimately indivisible, singular existence, but not why there exists an awareness of experience itself. That is, although we have demonstrated how existence can impactively interact with itself to create the form of any experience, we have yet to explain why there exists an awareness of that experiential form—in other words, why the differentiated area of reality that exists as the experiencer is aware of the form of its impactive-interactive relationship with the surrounding reality. In the following sections, we will explain why an awareness of the experiential boundary exists. In understanding why awareness exists, the nature of consciousness will become apparent.

Consciousness is unlimited, borderless, and undefined, whereas awareness is limited, bordered, and defined. When awareness becomes caught up in experiential reality, mistaking experiential reality for an independently existent reality, it literally becomes un-consciousness, or the opposite of consciousness. Since, for awareness, reality is whatever it experiences it to be, although awareness always remains what it is (i.e., consciousness), what awareness can experience itself to be is another matter entirely. For this reason, awareness can become unaware, can become unconscious of what it is, can become experientially cut off or separated from the consciousness that lies both within and beyond the screen of experience.