Is Awareness Blank? The Two Faces of What You Are

Part 3 of 6 in the Know Thy Mind series · Module 1: Mind Literacy

If the deepest knower cannot be turned into an object, what is it like? Not blank, as it turns out. The awareness in which experience appears has two inseparable features: it is luminous, it makes things known; and it is alive, it has a felt self-presence. Neither works without the other.

Why ask whether awareness is empty?

The previous post found that the observing cannot be made into an object. That leaves a natural question. Is this just a blank space, a silent witness that does nothing? An inert presence that merely receives?

The answer comes not from argument but from looking. And what careful looking finds is that awareness has two distinct features which cannot be pulled apart.

The first face: awareness is luminous

Notice your current experience. Sensations in the body, sounds in the room, thoughts, perhaps a feeling tone. Whatever is present, it is being known.

This is so constant that it is easy to overlook. You do not have to do anything to make experience known. You do not switch on an inner light. As long as you are awake, your experience is lit from within.

The Sanskrit term is Prakāśa: light, luminosity, that which reveals. The awareness in which experience appears is itself a kind of light, in the sense that it makes things knowable. Sunlight makes objects in a room visible; Prakāśa makes thoughts, feelings and perceptions known.

But notice a difference. The sun illuminates the room, yet the sun itself needs no further light to be seen. It shines by itself. Awareness is like this. It does not need a second awareness to know that it is aware. It is self-revealing. You can check this: when a thought arises, you do not recruit some other faculty to know that thinking is occurring. The knowing is already built in.

The second face: awareness is alive

Now notice something equally simple and more easily missed.

The awareness in which experience appears is not blank. There is a quiet felt sense of being present, an inner alertness, an "I am" that is not yet "I am anything in particular".

Try it. Without thinking about anything, simply notice that you are here. Not the person with the history and preferences, just the bare felt fact of being awake. Notice that this presence is alive. It has a tone. It is not nothing.

The Kashmir traditions called this Vimarśa, a harder word to translate, carrying senses of self-reflection, self-awareness and inner pulsation. Where Prakāśa names awareness as light, Vimarśa names it as living self-presence.

Consider what is missing if awareness were purely passive. A mirror reflects whatever is placed before it, but does not know it is reflecting. A screen displays an image but has no felt presence. A camera records but does not experience.

What you are investigating is different. It knows itself as present, and that self-knowing is its own nature. This is why the deepest "I" feeling, the bare "I am" before any "I am tired", is not a thought. It is the felt self-presence of awareness itself.

Why can't the two be separated?

Imagine awareness with luminosity but no self-presence. There would be illumination, but nobody knowing the illumination. Light that revealed without being known to reveal would not be awareness at all; it would be a mechanical process.

Now imagine self-presence with no luminosity. There would be a felt sense of being present, but nothing would appear and nothing would be known. That is not awareness either; it is a closed point with no content.

So awareness is necessarily both at once. It illuminates, and it knows itself as illuminating. As warmth and brightness are inseparable in a flame, these are inseparable in awareness. This course holds them together in a single term: Consciousness-Energy. Consciousness names the luminous knowing aspect; Energy names the dynamic, self-aware aspect that the Vedāntic vocabulary calls Śakti.

This is also where this teaching parts company with a common misreading. Some presentations describe pure awareness as a still witness, an inert backdrop against which an illusory world plays out. That is not the picture here. Awareness is living. The world unfolding within it is not an illusion projected onto a passive screen; it is the expression of an awareness that is creative by nature. Do not picture the deepest layer of yourself as a blank emptiness. The ground is alive, and you have already met its aliveness in the simple fact that you are here, awake, knowing.

Has science found the same thing?

Strikingly, yes, from the opposite direction.

For most of the twentieth century, mainstream cognitive science treated the mind as a passive processing system. Sensory input arrived, mechanical operations processed it, meaning was added later by higher-level interpretation. The brain was a receiver.

That picture has been substantially revised. Research on embodied cognition shows the brain does not first register neutral data and then attach meaning. Meaning is built into perception from the start. When a musician hears a melody, regions associated with movement and motor planning activate, as though the body were already preparing to play. When someone reads the word "sandpaper", the sensory cortex registers something rough, as if the hand were imagining the texture. The brain anticipates, simulates and prepares to participate in what it encounters.

This is not proof of the contemplative teaching. But it is a genuine convergence. Two entirely different methods, inquiry from the inside and laboratory neuroscience from the outside, arrived at the same observation: consciousness is not a passive receiver. It is active, anticipatory, meaning-making, alive. The Kashmir traditions named this Vimarśa a thousand years before embodied cognition had a name.

What does a living awareness mean for mental health?

Compare two ways of understanding the mind.

In the first, the mind is a recording device. Experiences happen to it, it stores them, and over time certain patterns harden into anxieties and identifications. Suffering is something deposited in the system, and the question is how to extract it.

In the second, the mind is a living, self-modifying system. Experiences happen, but the mind is not merely recording them; it is actively constructing, interpreting and reinforcing, moment by moment. The patterns that harden are not deposits but ongoing processes the system continues to sustain. Which means they can be reshaped, because the same power that built them can build differently.

The second picture is the one the contemplative traditions have always held, and the one modern neuroscience confirms through neuroplasticity. The brain is not a fixed structure. Its connections and activity levels change according to how it is habitually used. Sustained attention practice over months shows measurable changes in attention-related regions. Repeatedly rehearsed worry strengthens the circuits that generate worry. Compassion practice changes circuits related to empathy and emotional regulation.

Neuroplasticity is the dynamic aspect of awareness expressed at the level of the physical brain: Vimarśa, independently confirmed by an entirely different methodology.

This changes the story you can tell about your own difficulties. Patterns of contraction, fear and chronic reactivity are not permanent verdicts. They are grooves worn by repeated use, and the same power that wore them can wear different ones.

Try this: two brief notices

Notice the luminosity. Pause and let attention rest. Notice that whatever is present is being known: the sensation, the sound, the thought. You are not doing anything to make this happen. Rest with that fact for a few breaths. Knowing is happening.

Notice the living presence. Now shift away from particular contents and notice simply that you are here. Not your name or your roles, just the bare sense of being awake. Notice that this presence is not blank. It has a tone, a quiet aliveness.

Over time these two notices may stop feeling like two. Awareness that knows, and knows itself as knowing.

Going deeper. The full Lesson 1.3 develops Prakāśa and Vimarśa in detail, the argument for their inseparability, and the fuller convergence with embodied cognition and neuroplasticity research. The pair introduced here recurs throughout the course under different names, and becomes technical in Module 4 as the spectral and temporal aspects of Ritam. Explore the course →

Prefer to listen? This lesson is episode 1.3 of The Mind in the Light of Modern and Spiritual Sciences, free on Apple Podcasts. Listen →

Frequently asked questions

What do Prakāśa and Vimarśa mean? Prakāśa means light or luminosity: awareness as that which reveals and makes things knowable. Vimarśa means self-awareness or inner pulsation: awareness as living self-presence that knows itself. They are two aspects of one awareness, not two things.

Is consciousness passive or active? On this account, active. It does not merely receive experience; it knows itself knowing, and it participates in constructing what appears. Embodied cognition research reaches a similar conclusion from the laboratory side.

What is neuroplasticity's relevance here? It is the biological expression of awareness being self-modifying rather than fixed. If the brain reshapes itself according to use, then habitual patterns of anxiety or rumination are grooves rather than verdicts.

Previously: [Who Is the One Who Knows?](https://www.vedanta.nz/post/who-is-the-one-who-knows) · Next in the series: Why Stillness and Movement Are Not Opposites.

Swami Tadananda teaches at Vedanta New Zealand (Ramakrishna Vedanta Centre, Auckland).