Normal awareness is the awareness that is always present, even when you’re lost in thought or on auto-pilot. It enables sensing, feeling, doing. Without it you’d be unconscious.
The shift is something to be experienced: Look at something like you’d normally look at things, then be aware that you are looking at it. It’s simple and modest, a little moment of self-reflexive awareness, but sometimes you go hours or days without it happening!
What is the difference between them for you?
Without context, frankly I don’t give a damn 
. In a discussion, I’m just interested in where the other person is camping - what they are seeing and why.
Where else can it happen? When there’s awareness of how thought is responding to stimuli, and whether the response is the usual conditioning, or something new, it’s all happening in one brain.
Metacognition (per the above) is an awareness of one’s cognitive processes, what I’m talking about is an awareness of being aware. So they’re in the same ballpark, but a bit different. Meta-awareness otoh sounds just about right.
I understand.
We know we can be self-aware, mindful inwardly and outwardly, but does awareness need to acknowledge itself? It seems to me that awareness is consciousness and thought is its content. If I lose my content, I cease to exist, but is awareness affected by what happens to I?
I struggle with this question a lot!
If you think of awareness as a light that makes objects visible (hearable, feelable) this light can, in my experience, burn brighter or dimmer according to awakeness, mood, intention. Maybe that’s because awareness itself changes in intensity, or maybe awareness always burns at 100% but the mind obscures it.
?
Many many things. And the discoveries continue. The motivation is to discover, not to accumulate. That’s why I keep returning to ‘the fundamentals.’ They are always new.
But that’s me. I’ve always been unconventional in this way. Most people are probably looking for that one something that will make everything okay, good, perfect.
What do you mean by the fundamentals?
Awareness, consciousness, self I ego, psychological time, freedom, thought, meditation.
If we use this metaphor, the question is whether the metaphorical eye is the problem, or the light is the problem. The :“eye” is the conditioned mind and what it sees in the light of awareness, so if the light is dim, the eye can see what it’s conditioned to see. But if the light of awareness is bright, the illumination may be too much for the conditioned eye, and it reacts by denying what it sees.
Krishnamurti used the phrase “choiceless awareness”, which suggests that the conditioned mind can dim the light of awareness, making distortion possible. So for awareness to be choiceless, it has to be bright enough to illuminate the chosen distortion and denial of conditioned response.
So what is discovery in this area? Not what it is we may have discovered, but what is the nature of discovery?
Are we motivated to discover intense regret, sadness, anger or guilt?
Insight is the term most often used here, so I’ll use it too: Insight into the nature of awareness, consciousness, self I ego, and so on.
Yes, if these things arise in my consciousness, I am sometimes (not always) motivated to discover something of their nature, what makes them tick.
Or both:
The light burns bright and the conditioned mind does the dimming.
The light dims on its own (fatigue, drugs, mood).
Doesn’t insight illuminate the entire area of consciousness? That is the nature of real discovery, isn’t it? It is not an isolated event, separate from all the rest, but it reveals the whole network of connections.
I think we have different interpretations of ‘insight.’ For me:
If insight is like a flashbulb in a dark room, the intensity of the flash determines the scope of the insight. It might be possible to have an insight that flashes so bright it illuminates the entire field of consciousness. (I’ve never experienced it.) But it’s way more likely for an insight flash to illuminate a part of consciousness. (We’ve all had plenty of those.)