awareness

Apart from awareness bringing you an understanding and a consciousness of what you are doing, the witness, the part of you that is aware, is not part of what it is aware of. It is not caught up in what it is aware of, it has a distance from it, and that distance is a freedom. That is why awareness is so vital because it not only gets you to know what is going on in you so you can see if there are ways of changing or improving things, but having a distance you say 'Well, yeah, I'm feeling like hell, I'm aware that this person is feeling hell but from a place where it is not in hell.' The witness is not in hell, otherwise it couldn't get a distance. If it was all hell, then you can't be at a distance.