Awareness

Buddhist and Advaita philosophical background

Indian Buddhist scholars analyzed awareness in detail long before modern psychology. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on mind in Indian Buddhist philosophy describes Abhidharma as a theory of consciousness that uses overlapping terms such as vijñāna, citta and manas, and says consciousness is held to arise in dependence on a sense faculty, an object and attention. It presents the Yogācāra notion of reflexive awareness as a later development that addressed difficulties in the earlier account of mind as a series of momentary events.

In the Advaita Vedānta tradition, the Stanford Encyclopedia entry places Śaṅkara in the eighth century CE as the earliest sustained articulation of a philosophy of consciousness. Dates vary, with early scholars proposing 788–820 CE and later proposals of 700–750 CE, and no dependable records of his life survive beyond his writings. In the entry's account, consciousness appears from the ordinary standpoint as a witnessing presence (sākṣin) and from the absolute standpoint as self-illuminating and identical with brahman.

Rigpa in Tibetan Dzogchen

In the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism, Dzogchen teachings distinguish ordinary mind (sems) from primordial knowing (ye shes), often discussed through the term rigpa (rig pa), rendered as pure awareness. A 2025 open-access study by Chiara Mascarello, drawing on Germano, Waldron and Higgins, calls this distinction a key element of the system and traces the notion of self-awareness (rang rig) from soteriological concerns before Dignāga to a more epistemological orientation afterward. It is a philosophical analysis and does not date practices or measure experiences.

Self-awareness in modern psychology

A systematic review of management-education literature summarizes objective self-awareness theory, introduced by Duval and Wicklund in 1972, as a state in which attention is focused on the self and compared with personal standards, a state that later work suggested could be aversive when a discrepancy arises. The same review of 31 articles found no consistent definition of self-awareness and an overlap with self-consciousness and self-knowledge.

Awareness, consciousness and attention

The Stanford Encyclopedia entry on consciousness separates creature consciousness, which includes sentience, wakefulness and self-consciousness (being aware that one is aware), from state consciousness, which it divides into several senses, among them awareness of mental states, phenomenal experience and access to information for reasoning and action. Awareness is therefore not one fixed concept in philosophy of mind.

Attention is described in the Stanford Encyclopedia as the selective directedness of mental life, and its relation to consciousness is disputed: some theorists hold that attention is necessary for conscious experience, others that it mainly determines what can be reported. A 2007 review argued that top-down attention and consciousness are distinct processes that can dissociate. The Attention page on this site covers attention itself.

Self-awareness and self-consciousness

The Stanford Encyclopedia entry on self-consciousness distinguishes awareness of oneself as oneself from consciousness in general, and reflective self-consciousness, which treats one's own mental states as objects of attention, from pre-reflective self-consciousness, which it describes as implicit in conscious experience without taking oneself as an object.

In psychology, Trapnell and Campbell proposed in 1999 that the private self-consciousness scale combined two unrelated dispositions, rumination and reflection, which may explain why higher scores were linked to more accurate self-knowledge and also to more psychological distress.

Terms in contemplative writing

Neuroscientist Zoran Josipovic uses awareness only for consciousness as such, meaning a non-conceptual, non-dual awareness, and not for awareness of a specific stimulus or general alertness. He treats consciousness as such and nondual awareness as interchangeable and notes that familiar terms can change meaning when applied to it. Translation is also contested: Mascarello's study contrasts rigpa and primordial knowing with ordinary consciousness, and treats these as different levels, not as synonyms for everyday attention.

How the idea appears in contemplative teaching

Contemplative traditions that treat awareness as central describe methods meant to help a person recognize it. Josipovic reports that some methods rely on separating consciousness as such from all content, while teachers also point out that it can co-occur with any content, a combination that can be misread as requiring all content to stop. His phenomenal descriptions come from texts of various traditions and from contemporary meditators, and are theoretical rather than empirical.

In the Dzogchen sources discussed by Mascarello, adherents describe instructions that direct a practitioner to discern, within the flow of thoughts and sensations, an invariant pre-representational awareness, which is then contrasted with dualistic mind. These descriptions are teachings, not procedures to be followed from this page.

How the idea appears in psychology and workplace programs

Self-awareness is a feature of many leadership and management-development programs and is often measured with tools such as 360-degree feedback. The Carden review offers a working definition that includes awareness of one's internal state, of what drives behavior, and of the effect on others, and proposes that it can be developed through focus, evaluation and feedback, while leaving the best methods for further research.

Sutton's 2016 questionnaire study treats dispositional self-awareness as conceptualized in several ways, including insight, reflection, rumination and mindfulness, each linked to different outcomes.

Contemplative and altered-state claims

Within Dzogchen, Mascarello describes the distinction between ordinary mind and primordial knowing as indispensable to the tradition's account of the path to liberation. In Advaita, the Stanford Encyclopedia describes recognition of the self as pure non-intentional consciousness, identical with brahman, as liberation. These are doctrinal claims within their traditions and not findings of empirical research.

Millière and colleagues note that many contemplative traditions explicitly aim to dissolve the sense of self through altered states, and Josipovic links nondual awareness to unitary experiences reached through contemplative methods, mind-altering substances or spontaneously. The phrase expanded awareness was not used as a defined technical term in the sources reviewed for this page.

Psychological and workplace claims

The Carden review reports that high self-awareness is claimed to lead to better decision making and is linked in the literature to team performance and authentic leadership. Sutton adds that self-awareness is generally associated with positive psychological wellbeing, while different conceptualizations bring different outcomes, including costs. These claims describe associations in management and psychology writing.

Neuroscience of consciousness and attention

The Stanford Encyclopedia describes neural correlates of consciousness as the minimal neural events jointly sufficient for a specific conscious percept, and lists competing theories (global workspace, recurrent processing, higher-order and integrated information) without a settled winner. In a 2025 preregistered adversarial collaboration, 256 participants viewed stimuli during fMRI, MEG and intracranial EEG. Results matched some predictions of integrated information and global workspace theories while substantially challenging key tenets of both. The study tested visual consciousness, not meditative awareness.

Nondual awareness in meditation

Josipovic's 2013 review reports a study of nondual awareness as experienced in Tibetan Buddhist meditation, examining anticorrelated intrinsic and extrinsic brain networks, and preliminary data from a further study pointing to a precuneus network. Only the abstract was reviewed here. The work is exploratory, concerns experienced meditators, and does not show that the experience is better or worse for health.

Self-focus, rumination and wellbeing

A 2002 meta-analysis of 226 effect sizes found that self-focused attention was associated with negative affect, more strongly for rumination than for non-ruminative self-focus, and more strongly in clinical samples. Self-focus on positive self-aspects, or after a positive event, was related to lower negative affect. Private self-focus related more to depression and generalized anxiety, and public self-focus to social anxiety.

In Sutton's questionnaire study, self-reflection and insight predicted beneficial outcomes, rumination predicted reduced benefits and more costs, and mindfulness predicted both greater proactivity and greater costs. These are self-report associations, not tests of an intervention.

Self-report awareness scales

Brown and Ryan's 2003 paper introduced the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale and reported studies in which scores related to well-being measures and to enhanced self-awareness, and in which increases in mindfulness among patients with cancer related to declines in mood disturbance and stress. Baer and colleagues found that five existing questionnaires together suggested five facets of mindfulness, and that the factor structure may vary with meditation experience.

Challenges to measurement

Paul Grossman's 2011 critique argues that such scales lack external referents for construct validity, lack evidence that self-reports correspond to actual behavior, show poor convergent validity among scales, and may be answered differently by people with different meditation experience. He argues that they may distort the Buddhist meaning of mindful awareness. This is a published critique with its own defenders, and scores should be read with these limits in mind. See the Mindfulness page for intervention trials.

Meditation-related adverse effects

A systematic review of 83 studies with 6,703 participants found that 65 percent reported at least one meditation adverse event. Overall prevalence was 8.3 percent, 3.7 percent in experimental studies and 33.2 percent in observational studies. Anxiety, depression and cognitive anomalies were most often reported, and events also occurred in people with no previous mental health problems. Suicidal behaviors were reported in 6 of the 55 studies that reported any event.

In 96 participants in three variants of an eight-week mindfulness-based cognitive therapy program, 83 percent reported at least one meditation-related side effect, 58 percent an effect with negative valence and 37 percent a negative effect on functioning. Lasting bad effects occurred in 6 to 14 percent and were associated with signs of dysregulated arousal, including hyperarousal and dissociation. The authors compared these rates with other psychological treatments.

In a survey of 1,232 regular meditators, 25.6 percent reported particularly unpleasant experiences they thought meditation may have caused. Reports were more likely with higher repetitive negative thinking, with deconstructive practices such as vipassana, and with retreat attendance. The survey asked a single question and cannot establish cause.

Self-focus, self-loss and care boundaries

Rumination is the self-focused pattern most consistently linked with distress in the sources above. Millière and colleagues caution that self-loss can take several forms and that temporary self-loss should not be equated with selflessness as a lasting trait. The sources reviewed do not report how often depersonalization disorder occurs among people who practice awareness methods.

No professional register or training standard specific to awareness as a concept was found in the sources reviewed. A person who has persistent distress, detachment from self or surroundings, or thoughts of self-harm after contemplative practice should seek assessment from a qualified health professional, and awareness practices should not delay or replace necessary care.