Part 3: The Nature of Reality – How Awareness Appears as the World
Series Note: ✨ You’re reading part three in the series What is Consciousness? Exploring Our True Nature. Each post is an invitation to look more deeply into the mystery of who we are, beyond the lens of the mind.
Awareness Appearing as Experience
Dr. Alberto Villoldo, who has spent decades bridging neuroscience and ancient shamanic traditions, reminds us that Awareness never switches off. Even when we are “dead to the world” in sleep, when the senses are quiet and the mind is at rest, Awareness remains. We dream, and in those dreams Awareness is alive, attentive, perceiving. It knows waking experience and it knows dreaming experience — it is the constant witness behind both.
This insight alone can shift how we see life. Awareness is not limited to the waking mind, nor is it created by the body. It is the ever-present field in which all states — waking, dreaming, sleeping — arise and dissolve.
The Mirror and the Ocean
Villoldo also likens consciousness to the ocean: vast, boundless, immeasurable. Our individual personalities, feelings, and memories are like waves or currents — unique movements within the whole.
When the wave subsides — when a life ends — nothing is lost. The movement merges back into the vastness, enriching the ocean itself. In the same way, our accumulated experiences expand the wholeness of Infinite Consciousness, what some traditions call God, Source, or Oneness.
Why We Miss It
The finite mind insists on fragmentation. It labels and separates: “This is me, that is you. This is good, that is bad. The dream is unreal, the world is real.” Useful for navigation, but incomplete.
Every perception, waking or dreaming, arises within the same indivisible field of Awareness. The mistake is to cling to the labels while overlooking the living field in which they arise.
As Nisargadatta Maharaj said:
“The world is only a reflection of the mind. Behind the mind is the infinite ocean of Awareness.”
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Become aware of the space in which this moment is happening — the living field of awareness that holds your body, breath, thoughts, and sounds.
Notice that everything arises within this field, not outside of it. Even the sense of “me” appears here.
Rest your attention, not on what you are aware of, but on awareness itself — the silent presence already here.
Gently ask: What is it that knows this experience?
When the seer, the seen, and the act of seeing dissolve, what remains is the simple knowing of being itself.
Why This Matters
When we know that Awareness is present not only in waking life but also in dream and sleep, we begin to taste its continuity. We are not fleeting selves who flicker in and out of existence. We are the ocean itself — boundless, eternal, expressing as waves of thought, sensation, and life.
From here, death itself looks different. It is not annihilation but return: the wave flowing back into the ocean, the reflection dissolving into the mirror, the dream rejoining the dreamer.
And from here too, compassion arises. If all beings are waves of the same ocean, then to harm another is to harm oneself. To love another is to love the Whole.
Next in the Series
In Part 4, we’ll explore: The Play of Consciousness – Why the Infinite Appears as the Finite.
Further Reading & References
Dr. Alberto Villoldo – The Heart of the Shaman / One Spirit Medicine
Nisargadatta Maharaj – I Am That
Rupert Spira – Being Aware of Being Aware
The Upanishads – reflections on Brahman as the ground of reality
The world is not outside of you — it rises and falls within the ocean of Awareness you already are.
