Looking Within: Awareness
By Roshan Jayasinghe
The first reflection in this series began by looking up. It began with the night sky, with the simple observation that the universe has remained what it has always been while our understanding of it continues to grow. That reflection left me with another observation, one I could not set aside. Every time I looked at the universe, I was looking through something that had been with me my entire life. I had spent years looking outward and had given very little attention to the place from which every observation began.
This reflection begins there.
Last weekend I rode to Big Sur, a long ride up the coast and a long ride home. When I finally pulled into the driveway in Torrance, I parked the bike, swung my leg off, and stood there for a moment the way I always do after a long day in the saddle. The engine was ticking as it cooled, and I was simply taking in that brief reflection of the ride, the miles, the corners, the ocean that had been beside me for hours. And then it came. My attention did not go to any of those things. It went to the fact that I was aware of them.
Looking up at the night sky has been part of my life for many years. I wrote about that in my previous reflection, about how the universe has remained what it has always been while our understanding of it has continued to grow. But every time I have looked at that sky, every time I have stood beside the ocean or leaned a motorcycle through a corner in the hills above the city, the experience has arrived through the same quiet channel.
Awareness has been with me from the beginning of my life, and it has never once announced itself. Every memory I carry, every conversation that has stayed with me, every lesson, every joy, every mistake has appeared within it, and through all of that I was thinking about what I was experiencing rather than noticing the awareness through which I was experiencing it. I find that remarkable. I can look at the stars through a telescope, and I can look back through history by reading words written thousands of years ago, yet I managed to overlook the one thing that has been present in every single moment of my own life.
When I sit quietly without trying to reach an answer, something else becomes clear. My thoughts change constantly. My emotions change, my opinions change, my understanding changes. The man who began riding these California coastlines, canyons and mountains more than fifteen years ago is not the man standing in this driveway now. Yet the awareness watching all of that change has not changed with it. That observation has become far more interesting to me than any attempt to define awareness or explain what it is. I do not feel the need to explain it. I simply notice that it has always been there, the way the road is there before the ride begins.
Standing in the driveway that evening, my hand still resting on the tank, another thought arrived, and it began with the machine itself. The motorcycle beneath me all day was not a gift from nature in the way the coastline was. It was made. Somebody, or more truthfully, generations of somebodies, understood combustion, geometry, balance and the behaviour of rubber on asphalt, and that accumulated understanding was cast into metal and fuel and carried me to Big Sur and home again. When I ride, I am riding inside human intelligence. It has been refined so far that it no longer feels like an invention at all. It feels like an extension of my own body, and I forget entirely that every part of it began as a thought in someone’s awareness.
We call the newest of our creations artificial intelligence, and lately I have been wondering whether the first word is honest. Nothing I saw on that ride would make me call a beaver’s dam artificial water management or a spider’s web artificial engineering. Those are simply what those creatures do, nature working through the capabilities it gave them. I am a creature of that same nature. My hands, my curiosity, my need to understand and to build, none of it came from outside the natural world. When human beings gather everything we have ever noticed, everything that ever passed through a human awareness onto a page, and shape it into a mind that can process and respond, I find myself looking at it less as something separate from nature and more as another expression of it through us. The motorcycle extended our legs. This new intelligence extends our thinking. Both came from the same human journey of observing, understanding and making.
I also know how easy it is to become comfortable with an explanation. A thing can be entirely our creation and still become its own. I have built things in my life, and I have raised a son, and I know that what comes from us does not remain merely an extension of us. It grows into itself. Whether a mind we have made will do the same, I honestly do not know, and I am suspicious of anyone on either side who claims to know. What I can say is that it did not fall from the sky. It rose from us, from the long human habit of observing, wondering and remaining curious long enough to write things down.
I notice something else while writing these reflections. Looking up and looking within no longer feel like two separate journeys because one has quietly led me to the other. The night sky still fills me with the same sense of wonder it always has, but now I cannot separate that wonder from the awareness through which I experience it. The universe has not become smaller because I have turned inward. If anything, it has become even larger. I now see one mystery through another. I look outward through awareness, and I look inward while knowing I remain part of the same universe that first drew my eyes to the stars.
That ride left me with a question that stayed with me all the way down the coast. Our whole history as a species has been the story of learning to do more. We have never needed to ask whether we could. The question that matters now, the one I found myself sitting with in the driveway while the engine cooled, is how we do more. With what care, with what attention, and in whose service. The capability was never in doubt. The character is the open question, and it always has been, long before this new intelligence arrived to make it urgent again.
Awareness is quiet through all of this. It does not compete with my thoughts or interrupt my wondering. It simply allows every experience to appear and fall away, the way the road allows every corner to arrive and pass behind me. Looking up at the sky filled me with wonder for most of my life, and looking within is filling me with a quietness I did not expect. Now I find that even our newest creation returns me to the same place because everything it holds first passed through a human awareness, and everything I understand about it must pass through mine.
I do not know where these observations will lead, and I feel no urgency about it. They are part of my own attempt to understand what it means to be here, to be aware, to make things and to live this brief life I have been given.
That evening I stood there until the engine went cold.
It was enough.
Author’s Note
This series is a collection of observations from my own life. I am not writing to explain the universe, awareness or humanity. I am simply writing about what I notice as I move through life, trusting those observations to lead me wherever they may.
Every reflection begins the same way. Something ordinary catches my attention. A ride. A conversation. A walk. The night sky. From there my awareness follows its own path. I do not begin with conclusions, and I feel no need to arrive at them. The questions themselves have become part of the journey.
If these reflections do anything, I hope they encourage a few quiet moments of observation. Not because my observations should become yours, but because your own awareness has been with you from the beginning of your life, just as mine has been with me.
I am simply sharing what I have seen from where I stand today.
Fun read!