| | I'd like to go back to the original question: "Can awareness be a focus of inquiry?"
From a very stripped down point of view that is at once practical and very ultimate at once, all sensations are aware where they are. There is no separate observer, though the sense of one is contrived by a very complex process of layers of content, inference, habit, poor perception, false assumption, and in general poor perception of the true nature of one's sensate reality, and investigating that is direct wisdom practice.
Thus, investigation of "awareness" yields the following: one finds only sensations, and the more one looks, the more one finds that all the things that were pretending to be an observer, attention, consciousness, awareness, and the like were merely transient, ephemeral, implied by habitual patterns of association, and not the true nature of things. Even the looking is just a causal, transient process, not self, not other, part of a naturally unfolding field of experience that never needed to nor did contain any experiencer apart from that which is experienced.
Thus, taking on "awareness" or similar objects, such as "investigation" or "attention" or "consciousness" as object takes on an illusion to try to see through that illusion, and show it to be just a trick of smoke and mirrors, something that never actually was, and all that is there is the self-luminous flickering sense-field.
Daniel |