Lesson 4: Naked Awareness

What exactly is this "naked awareness" and how do you develop it? One way to get at it is to reflect about what makes awareness not naked.

Let's start with the five senses and their effect on awareness.

[Aside: some people define more than the familiar five senses. Some people list over 20. In any case, we can stick with the basic five for our purposes here.]

Your eyes produce what the Buddhists call "eye consciousness" (vision). Your ears produce what they call ear consciousness (sounds). The others are tongue (or taste) consciousness, nose (or scent) consciousness, and touch consciousness. Each one affects awareness in its own way, but in one sense, they are the same: they all give rise to experiences in the field of awareness.

Let's stick with one channel, eye consciousness, and follow it through. It's more or less the same for any of the five consciousnesses.

Your eye consciousness contains the raw, immediate impression from your eyes. By raw, I mean that you're getting pure information, raw data, just what is coming in through your nervous system.

Eye consciousness is "mute." Words and concepts don’t come from your eyes. There are no labels identifying what you see, no meaning, no opinion about it, no desire, no associations with previous experiences, and no "me" that come into your brain with the image. There's just the raw sensory picture. See if you can experience this for yourself.

A pure sense consciousness, such as eye consciousness, is figuratively described as someone who can see (hear, feel, etc.) but can't talk. The eye consciousness presents an image to awareness but makes no comment about it. There is just the immediate and direct sense-experience itself. We have the ability to attend to the pure sensory information, leaving out all the other stuff. No labels or judgment are attached.

All of the five sense consciousnesses are like this. They do not have any mind elements such as ideas, words, judgments, preferences, evaluations, or anything like that. They are just pure sensory things.

Then there is mind consciousness. Mind consciousness has been called the "sixth consciousness" by Buddhists. The sixth consciousness is not in direct contact with the outside world like the five sense consciousnesses. It gets its information from the images or impressions given to it by the five senses. It interprets what you experience, and, in so doing, adds the captions or stories to the sensory displays that arise in the field of consciousness. The captions and stories, and all their associations, are what make awareness not "naked."

One good way to cultivate naked awareness is to take a moment from time to time to be just in your senses, without mixing the experience with any of those mind things. Just get the raw feed. You have to actually try this (and have at least a little success) for it to be real to you. You will notice that if you do it for a little while, the sixth consciousness (mind consciousness) gets left behind. If you do it a lot, it begins to get really left behind. There will be periods of time when it sort of dissolves away.

In summary:

• The five senses give us the five sense consciousnesses.
• The sixth consciousness is mind consciousness.
• The sixth consciousness "puts the captions on the pictures."
• You can directly perceive without mind consciousness.
• Practicing pure sense consciousness makes the sixth consciousness fade away.

There is more to understand about the six consciousnesses. Stay tuned and something really wonderful will unfold in your life.