"Awareness seems very close to consciousness in that it holds sense experience, but perhaps there is also mindfulness since it seems somewhat intelligent.

Consciousness in this usage means the knowing of an individual sense object: sight, sound, and so forth.

Awareness is not quite locatable. It is not an object that can be taken hold of; awareness is what holds objects.

Awareness is the activity of knowing; mind is the thing that does the knowing."

Emptiness: a practical guide for meditators

"Consciousness conditions name-and-form and name-and-form conditions consciousness. This is circular.

Consciousness, or knowing, is the basic characteristic of mind. Its function is to know sense experience.

Everything that comes into our human experience is an appearance in consciousness."

Emptiness: a practical guide for meditators

"Consciousness is the most basic knowing of an object, before any words and before perception. Perception can act only after consciousness has revealed an appearance which can then be named."

Emptiness: a practical guide for meditators

"Consciousness emerges as a phenomenon - an arising and passing episode of awareness - when a sense organ and a sense object make contact. This moment of contact consists of the cognizing of a sensory object (forms, sounds, smells, tastes or touches) or a mental object (thoughts, memories, plans, etc.) by means of a sensory organ (the eye, ear, nose, tongue or body) or by means of the mental organ (mind). Also coarising with this cognition is a momentary perception that identifies the object in light of past experience and stored recognition patterns, along with a momentary feeling tone that knows the object as pleasant, unpleasant or as carrying a feeling tone that is more neutral. When underlying tendencies of attachment, aversion or confusion are enacted, craving toward (or away from) the object also arises. Craving manifests either as wanting plesant feeling tones to persist (even as they inevitably pass away) or as wanting unpleasant sensations to go away (even as they continue to present as the sense door).

Grasping is an intentional stance taken by the active response mechanisms of the psychophysical organism. It takes the form of either 'attaching to' the object of the moment's experience or of 'resisting' the object of experience. Whether it manifests as holding on or pushing away, the attitude of grasping creates an artificial distancing of 'one's self' from what is happeing in the moment. It is this grasping response that causes the becoming of self, the momentary birth and death of self-identity that inevitably involves suffering.

[...] the liking or not liking of something is itself what creates the self, the person who likes or does not like what is happening this moment.

[...] grasping is not something done by the self; rather, self is something done by grasping.

[...] The self can only exist as a fleeting attitude toward experience, one in which 'the person who likes or does not like what is happening' is invented and defined.

[...] self as an event, self as a response - arises and passes away as relentlessly as everything else. A virtual self is born and dies as fast as our senses are capable of constructing and relinquishing experience. When this happens repetedly, the natural abilities of the mind to synthesize unity out of diversity and continuity out of discrete episodes of cognition conspire to create the ilusion of a stable entity. Just as a series of still photos presented at high speed will be resolved by the mind into a continuous visual narrative, so also a succession of discrete 'selves' will be identified in natural experience as the continuity of a single cohesive self. While each 'moment of selfing' is actually grounded in a unique combination of coarising sense organ, sense object, consciousness, perception, and feeling, and is constructed by a unique intentional response to each moment, the patterns of such response demonstrated by any individual are both regular and idiosyncratic enough to yield the experience of a unique self.

[...] the construction of personality - the fashioning of a self - only occurs when an attitude of possession or appropriation takes place. [...] When its moment passes away it is discarded, and another self is constructed to take temporary ownership of the next thing.

One has only to replace the grasping response, the reflex of holding on or pushing away, with an attitude of 'This is not mine, this is not me; this is not my self'.

[...] overcoming the propensity to create a self who suffers each moment calls for replacing the habitual response of grasping with equanimity."

Untangling self

"As soon as I come in touch with a situation in the world, it feels a certain way, makes perceptual sense and inclines me to adopt a stance toward it.

Consciousness emerges out of the entire complex of interactions between an organism and its environment.

Consciousness is a seamless whole that is not equivalent to the sum of its parts.

Consciousness has a total, unified awareness of what is happening that none of its constituents (feeling, perception, inclination, etc.) can achieve on their own.

For Gotama there can be no such thing as "pure" consciousness, an unconditioned or pristine "knowing" that exists independently of the phenomenal world of discrete physical things and mental processes.

Without a condition there is no arising of consciousness.

Consciousness is determined by the particular conditions that give rise to it. 

Consciousness  is a impermanent, contingent, compounded and varied as anything else in experience." 

After Buddhism: Rethinking the Dharma for a secular age 

Early Buddhist maps of the mind - Andrew Olendski

"[...] grasping is not something done by the self, but rather self is something done by grasping. The self is constructed each moment for the simple purpose of providing the one who likes or doesn’t like, holds on to or pushes away, what is unfolding in experience. Just as there is a fundamental interdependence between consciousness and its object, so also is there an interdependence between desire and its subject. But there is no inherent bond between subject and object or between consciousness and desire."

Self as a verb - Tricycle: The Buddhist Review - Summer 2005

"We do face the more challenging problem of how first to uncover the socially constructed prejudices we all harbor and then to transform them, not at this level of intellectual argument but at the deeper level of changing emotional and behavioral responses. It is not about changing views (the aggregate of perception), but of reconstructing patterns of habitual reaction (the aggregate of formations). Fortunately, the Buddha bequeathed to us a powerful tool for doing this: mindfulness.

Psychology has demonstrated clearly that some of what we do is conscious and some is unconscious. That is to say, we are consciously aware of a narrow band of our experience as it unfolds, but most of what happens is formulated out of view and emerges apparently on its own from the mysterious depths of the psyche to surge into behavior unhindered by awareness. Our views and reactions are formed as they appear, based on patterns laid down in the past, and consciousness is more a matter of observing what is already unfolding than of deciding what will take place.

Mindfulness practice involves training the ability to observe what is happening within us in the present moment with an attitude of patience, kindness, and equanimity. As different bodily sensations or feeling tones or thoughts arise into conscious awareness, we “watch along with” (anupassati) them, or “gaze evenly upon” (upekkhati) them, or are simply “aware of” (pajanati) and “fully experience” (patisamvedati) them. If we get angry at what we see, or if any sort of response rooted in attraction or aversion occurs, then we are thrust out of mindful awareness and get carried away ..."

Shining a light - Tricycle: The Buddhist Review - Fall 2015

"Mindfulness practice does lead to happiness, but not because the stuff of the mundane now - its sights, sounds, and the consciousness that knows them -  turns out to be better than we'd thought. Despite the myth, bare attention doesn't expose some hidden core of radiance in the empty vibrations; no such core exists."

What's so great about now? - Tricycle:  The Buddhist Review - Winter 2006

"The Buddha clearly stated the reason for practicing mindfulness: to uncover and eliminate the cause of suffering. That cause is desire. When its cause is absent, suffering cannot arise. At that point, the sutras tell us, one knows a happiness with no hint of anxiety to mar it. But that isn't because sights and sounds magically become permanent, lovely, and the property of Self. Rather, these impressions temporarily cease and consciousness touches a supramundane object called "nibbana," the unconditioned element. Although a mental object, nibbana, the "highest bliss," is not a formation at all; it is unformed and permanent. So the present moment is worthwhile because only in it can we experience nibbana - complete freedom from suffering.

Yet can't sense-impressions be pleasurable? Yes, but pleasure isn't the unending source of happiness we take it to be. In daily life we perceive beautiful sensations as solid and relatively lasting, when in fact they're only unstable vibrations that fall away the instant they form. Like cotton candy that dissolves before you can sink your teeth into it, pleasure doesn't endure long enough to sustain happiness. " 

What's so great about now? - Tricycle:  The Buddhist Review - Winter 2006

"Take the sunset: What happens when we see it? Ultimately, we don't. When the eye contacts a visual form, we merely see color, not a three-dimensional thing. In fact, the tint, along with the consciousness seeing it, dies out in a split-second, but we fail to catch the dissolve. Why? Because delusion blurs the separate moments of perception together, making experience look seamless. After the color sparks out, subsequent moments of consciousness replay the image from memory, dubbing it "sunset." This process takes only a fraction of a second. Nevertheless, by the time we name it, the original image is already gone. "Sunset" is a concept perceived through the mind-door, not the eye. We mistake this product of mental construction for something irreducibly real. Without the tool of mindfulness the trick is too fast to see, like trying to catch the separate frames of a running film."

What's so great about now? - Tricycle:  The Buddhist Review - Winter 2006

"Consciousness is always aware of something. When a patch of azure bursts into our field of awareness, a blip of eye-consciousness sees the color. When a smell wafts toward us, another blip of consciousness knows the scent. Only mind and object; that's all there is to it. Our entire lives are nothing but a chain of moments in which we perceive one sight, taste, smell, touch, sound, feeling, or thought after another. Outside of this process, nothing else happens."

What's so great about now? - Tricycle:  The Buddhist Review - Winter 2006

"When we hear the word consciousness in English, we immediately speculate that there is a person to whom this consciousness belongs, an agent who wields it, or a self that consists of it. Yet early Buddhist texts speak of consciousness only as a process unfolding when certain conditions are met: “In dependence on an organ and an object there arises consciousness.” (Samyutta Nikaya 35.93) Or, more specifically, “When internally the eye is intact and external forms come into its range, and a corresponding conjunction occurs, then the manifestation of a corresponding instance of consciousness occurs.” (Majjhima Nikaya 28)

The role of consciousness is to serve up an appearance, either from the incoming data of the sense doors or from internal channels of memory, imagination, or conception. Backing this appearance up with a constructed sense of reality is a flourish added by perception. Consciousness is merely an event—the awareness of an object— while perception is the fabrication of an accompanying image or interpretive marker. Both are impersonal activities that occur naturally under certain conditions, and both the agent behind consciousness and the reality behind appearances are convenient but illusory concoctions of the mind."

Appearance and reality - Tricycle: The Buddhist Review - Fall 2009

"The Buddha declared in unequivocal terms that consciousness depends on matter, sensation, perception and mental formations, and that it cannot exist independently of them."

What the Buddha taught - p.25

"Conciousness is a reaction or response which has one of the six faculties (eye, ear, nose, tongue, body and mind) as its basis, and one of the six corresponding external phenomena (visible form, sound, odour, taste, tangible things and mind objects, i.e, an idea or thought) as its object."

What the Buddha taught - p.23