Consciousness
What is cit, consciousness? Its nature is knowing.
What is cit (consciousness)? It is of the nature of pure knowing.
Calling consciousness the Self's very nature, rather than its activity, means:
- Awareness is produced by the mind whenever it thinks
- Awareness is what the Self is, the light by which even the mind is known
- The Self knows objects the way the eye takes in colors
- Consciousness comes and goes with each passing thought
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Being that is also awake
Being, by itself, can sound inert: that which abides through all three times, a stone that merely persists. So the Self is called not only sat, ever-present, but cit, awake. It is being that is also awareness.
Awareness here is not something the Self does, the way the mind runs through one thought and then another. It is what the Self is. The mind seems to know, but it knows by borrowing this light, the way the moon gives back a light that is not its own. And this awareness is never among the things it lights up. Whatever you can notice and hold before you is, by that very fact, not the one noticing.
This is why being and awareness are spoken as one and not as two things joined. You are not existence with awareness added on. The same Self that is always there is the same awareness in which every knowing, every perception, every thought arises and is seen.
Right now, is there anything you know that is not lit by this same awareness?
In the commentaries
To call the Self cit is to say awareness is what it is, not a property it carries and not an act it performs; the mind appears to know only by borrowing this light, which is never itself one of the things known. Naming it so guards against picturing being as something merely inert: the Self that abides through all three times is the very awareness in which every act of knowing arises.