The Difference Between Consciousness and Awareness

In common usage, the term consciousness is synonymous with awareness or conscious awareness. It connects us with thoughts, feelings, images, dreams, body experiences and more, but it also allows us to experience the three-dimensional world (the phenomenal world) beyond our body’s surface.

It is important to distinguish between consciousness and awareness. Awareness means having knowledge of something because you observed it or somebody told you about it. For instance, when you meet someone you know on the street, your brain does not need to scan through old memories to recognize your friend. It realizes this information instantly, achieving a deeper level of awareness.

Consciousness, however, means being awake and aware of one’s surroundings. It is the state of being aware of what is happening in the environment surrounding you. A thought in our mind connects with a thought in someone else. For example, one woman was worrying about her dying father. She looked up at the sunset and saw his face in her mind, and his voice distinctly said, “Forgive me.” A few hours later that woman called her brother in New York. She learned that he had the same vision and heard the same words.    

Clarity about consciousness is vitally important. If we cannot properly name something, we cannot actually know it. We have no knowledge of it or influence over it.

When we reach a period of human evolvement and expansion, our consciousness must be focused if we are to live a meaningful and appropriate life. Meaning and purpose are the primary fruits of consciousness development.

Consciousness is what forms. It allows a person to reach enlightenment.  

It is the substantial essence of things that uncovers its universal truth and its singular individual characteristics. Consciousness is the soul of many possible realities and is their essence.

Everyone has a soul and is aware of its potential. Each person or thing is a distinct individual. However, we are all parts of something larger than our self is. It is consciousness or soul that binds us to our larger, universal nature, sometimes called the Divine Oneness.

When you are conscious, you use your heart, intuition, or faculties of knowing that expand the mind and other teaching bodies that exist in the realm of the soul. Thus, when you are aware of your conscience, you are not separated from what you know. You then merge with it. You identify with it as you test it. It moves with you in the manner in which you test it as a part of your larger individual.

When you are aware, you employ your mind to recognize something in an objective way. You know more about something. You have the knowledge, but you know you are separated from the thing you know. Awareness occurs, as mental reflex, at any time, when the mind is exposed to something. The only choice is concentrating on truth and how we want to advance our knowledge.

You can call the conscious “heart of knowing.” The beauty of the heart knows it is not separated from what it knows or meets. It is seen another way. By fully knowing it, we are touched by its essence, and in this manner, we resemble what we know. 

We are primarily loved because of soul beings. Through the knowing of the soul, we develop and increase our sense of direction of who we are as infinite souls. We find peace and harmony in our relationship with people and situations. We approach a deeper consciousness.

By Herman Wong