Is Awareness Enough?

“Awareness in and of itself is curative.” Fritz Perls, psychiatrist, co-founder of Gestalt therapy.

But "awareness" that's truly curative is much more than mere attentiveness. Moment-by-moment attentiveness is an important part of awareness, but it's only a part. Hyper-attentiveness (hypervigilance) is very far from awareness.

So what is "awareness"? Charlotte Joko-Beck described it like this:

“Awareness is our true self; it’s what we are. So we don’t have to try to develop awareness; we simply need to notice how we block awareness; with our thoughts, our fantasies, our opinions, and our judgments. We’re either in awareness, which is our natural state, or we’re doing something else. The mark of mature students is that most of the time, they don’t do something else. They’re just here, living their life. Nothing special.”

Shunryu Suzuki described it like this:

“Meditation opens the mind to the greatest mystery that takes place daily and hourly; it widens the heart so that it may feel the eternity of time and infinity of space in every throb; it gives us a life within the world as if we were moving about in paradise; and all these spiritual deeds take place without any refuge into a doctrine, but by the simple and direct holding fast to the truth which dwells in our innermost beings.”

What do you think? More importantly, how do you live?