"Expand your attention to its farthest edges. It has a round shape, not unlike the flashlight's illuminated area. If you place your hand in front of your face, you experience that sight because awareness is illuminating it. Even with your eyes open, you could not see your hand if you were unconscious. Move your hand behind your head and try to see it. You can wiggle your fingers to help your attention find it, but visually speaking it does not exist for now."
"This points to something hiding in plain sight: awareness itself. Awareness is the reason we can experience anything at all. It includes sights, sounds, sensations, thoughts, and emotions. It is so obvious and so constant that we overlook it. In contemplative traditions, this aspect is often called "luminous," and it forms the L in my CLEAR Awareness model, which stands for calm, luminous, expansive, allowing, and responsive."
Awareness functions as the constant background that makes every sensation, thought, and emotion knowable. Awareness illuminates experience, shaping what appears in perception much like a flashlight creates a visible field in darkness. Attention can shift from the contents of experience to awareness itself, revealing the presence that allows seeing, hearing, sensing, and thinking. Noticing awareness softens emotional reactivity and cultivates a steadier, more grounded relation to life. Many contemplative traditions name this luminous quality, and it is described as calm, luminous, expansive, allowing, and responsive in the CLEAR Awareness model. This luminosity is often overlooked because of its ubiquity.
Read at Psychology Today
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