The third lojong slogan is “Examine the nature of unborn awareness.” Like the previous slogan, “See everything as a dream,” this slogan asks us to consider the nature of the mind itself. We want to examine its nature. And its nature is unborn awareness.

But what’s that?! Well, unborn awareness is the sense of totality or emptiness you feel when you meditate and get into the “zone.” It’s when you lose sense of space and time. It’s wisdom clarity that simply knows and is. We call it unborn awareness because it describes the consciousness that lies underneath or beyond our reactions, our personality, our fleeting emotions and thoughts.

Here’s what’s confusing: nobody knows where this is or what this is. We use words like “consciousness” but ask any neuroscientist and they’ll tell you they have no idea where to locate consciousness in the brain. They may be able to discern whether a person is conscious, but it gets really fuzzy after that.

I know. It’s maddening. Here’s a fun little exercise: try to figure out who you are. I don’t mean this in a “what’s my life purpose” way. I mean: are you your body? But is that it? Are you your thoughts? But that’s not right. What about your feelings, or your beliefs, or your history? Well, that’s not entirely true either. You are all those things while also not entirely any of those things. And any description of who we are remains incomplete without this sense of unborn awareness, or Self, or soul. (If you’re looking to dive deep into this, Michael Singer’s The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself is the best book I know to explain this.)

For us, for today, just consider this: take a moment to recall what it feels like to focus your awareness. It doesn’t matter if it’s on a soccer game or a book or an art project. The quality of focused awareness remains the same. In meditation terms, you tap into your unborn awareness when you realize you are not your thoughts, but the thinker. You are the consciousness behind the thoughts (and emotions, and reactions, and storytelling, and meaning-making).

Unborn awareness doesn’t have an agenda or a storyline or a hangup or a complex. It simply is. That’s why we describe wisdom as coming from this centered, fully conscious place.

If we wanted, we could get really stuck in the details here. We could go down a philosophical rabbit trail and question everything and wonder if we’re living in the matrix. Instead, consider that unborn awareness expresses a wholeness within you. It is a wholeness you possess but do not own. We can embody that wholeness. We belong to that wholeness. But it’s far beyond us.

Just examine that today within yourself. Try to get a glimpse of it, or a brief encounter with it. Examine the nature of unborn awareness.