Free & present conscious awareness (or free attention) is the unfettered waking mind or state. Looking at it closely and anyone can do this, it is clearly functional, meaning it is available to think and act clearly and intelligently, rather than cluttered and unavailable for free thought and action as attention tends to constantly become.
Adi Da calls this state “perceptual mind” he writes.
“You Must Realize The Natural Ability To Set Aside The Secondary or conceptual Function Of mind, or Else You Will Be Dominated By A Compulsive and Obsessive Effort To think conceptually, To Seek knowledge About, To Interpret, and To Separate From the perceived conditional worlds.
You Must Enjoy The Natural, Inherent, moment to moment Ability To Merely perceive, To feel, To be with, and To Wholly Participate In the phenomenal conditions Of Your psycho-physical Existence, or Else You Will Not Truly Understand what arises conditionally, Nor Will You Transcend the limitations Of conditional Existence.
Through The Ordeal Of The Way Of The Heart, and By Means Of self-Observation, Developing self-Understanding, and The Progressively Awakening Natural Feeling-Practice Of Mere and always present perception, You Must Realize The Inherent Ability To Intentionally Relax The Chronic, Compulsive, and Obsessive Tendency Of attention To Become Associated With the past and the future and Even the present.
If moment to moment Mere and Also perceptible Existence Is Intolerable To You, So That You Are Unable To perceive each present perceptible moment as it is and To feel and Participate In it Without Recoil, You Will Exist Only In the Secondary or Reflected world of time and mind.”
Again in His description of the basis of “conscious exercise”, He writes :
“Do not randomly think and daydream, but apply the mind as free attention to the whole process of the present activity.
Mind is not, in itself, thought. Thought is only one of many objects of attention. Mind is basically consciousness, conscious awareness, or free attention itself. Therefore, the basic condition of mind in any moment is thoughtless free attention, or awareness. If attention is not turned into the relations of the whole body, it will, because of our habitual adaptation to separative and self-possessed games of existence, tend to reflect or randomly turn upon subjective and self-meditative phenomena.
Thus, we always think, randomly and obsessively, and we always turn within and away, and we always daydream or meditate on our own sense of independent existence, unless we are already and presently turned into the functional pattern of present relations.”
I find this consideration and practice very useful in daily life, particularly when engaged in work, where I tend to really get involved in subjectivity almost as a reaction to the demand to function.
