Mindfulness vs Pure Awareness: Two Paths, One Critical Difference
Mindfulness vs Pure Awareness is one of the most consequential distinctions in contemporary consciousness studies, and one of the least understood. Millions of people practice mindfulness as an attention-based practice daily, yet many report a persistent ceiling: a point where the practice calms the surface but leaves the deeper structure of identity untouched. Senad Dizdarević created the AIPA Method (Awakening Into Pure Awareness) precisely to address what lies beyond that ceiling. Not as a critique of mindfulness, but as a map of what comes after it.
Mindfulness has become the default prescription for modern psychological distress, from anxiety management to workplace burnout. But what if the most widely adopted contemplative practice in the West is built on a fundamental misunderstanding of what awareness actually is? The article “Mindfulness Vs Pure Awareness” examines the critical structural differences between attention-based mindfulness and observation-based Pure Awareness as defined in the AIPA Method, and why this distinction carries profound implications for identity reconstruction, emotional regulation, and lasting personal transformation.
Mindfulness vs Pure Awareness: The Short Answer
Mindfulness trains attention — the ability to observe thoughts and sensations without reacting. Pure Awareness is the stable ground from which that observation happens. The AIPA Method distinguishes these as two different levels: mindfulness manages the mind’s activity; Pure Awareness reconstructs the identity that generates it. One regulates. The other transforms.
Mindfulness vs Pure Awareness: What This Article Covers
This article examines the fundamental differences between mindfulness and Pure Awareness, explains why that distinction matters for lasting psychological transformation, and introduces the AIPA Method as a structured developmental framework that moves beyond attention training toward permanent identity reconstruction. It includes a side-by-side comparison, a three-stage developmental model, the author’s firsthand account of awakening, and a direct answer to whether mindfulness can lead to Pure Awareness.
Mindfulness and Pure Awareness: Core Definitions
What is Mindfulness?
Mindfulness is the practice of deliberately directing attention to present-moment experience — thoughts, sensations, emotions — with an attitude of non-judgmental observation. Rooted in Buddhist vipassanā meditation and developed into clinical frameworks such as MBSR (Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction) by Jon Kabat-Zinn, mindfulness operates primarily at the level of attention regulation. It teaches the practitioner to observe mental activity without being automatically controlled by it. The result is reduced reactivity, improved emotional regulation, and measurable decreases in stress and anxiety.
What is Awakening Into Pure Awareness?
Pure Awareness, as defined within the AIPA Method (Awakening Into Pure Awareness), is the basic Element of Existence (together with Energy and its different material states), a stable, non-reactive ground of consciousness, attention, and awareness that underlies all mental activity — the silent Presence that exists prior to thought, emotion, and identity. Awakening Into Pure Awareness is a personal developmental process: a structured progression through three stages in which the practitioner moves from identifying with mind, body, and ego-driven partial personalities, through increasing periods of stabilized awareness, to a permanent reconstruction of identity at its root, becoming a Being of Pure Awareness. Where mindfulness trains attention, the AIPA Method transforms the identity that generates the patterns mindfulness can only observe.
Mindfulness Vs Pure Awareness: The Mindfulness Confusion
Mindfulness, as it is commonly practiced and taught in the West, is typically defined as “paying attention to the present moment, non-judgmentally”. It is a formulation popularized by Jon Kabat-Zinn and adopted across clinical psychology, corporate wellness programs, and self-help culture. The practice has been operationalized into structured protocols like Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), accumulating a significant body of clinical research along the way.
Yet despite its popularity, mindfulness carries a foundational ambiguity that even researchers have struggled to resolve. A 2024 review published in the journal Mindfulness examined existing definitions and found persistent inconsistencies in how the construct is operationalized. It notes that mindfulness has been variously described as a trait, a state, a practice, and a cognitive skill, often within the same study. As William Mikulas observed in his influential paper “Mindfulness: Significant Common Confusions,” the conflation of concentration, awareness, insight, and attitude under a single umbrella term has created practical problems for both research and practice.
The core confusion is this: mindfulness, as typically taught, is fundamentally an attention-based practice. It trains the practitioner to direct and sustain attention to breathing, bodily sensations, thoughts, or external stimuli. But attention, by its very nature, is a limited, mobile form of awareness. It focuses, narrows, selects, and moves. Mindfulness Vs Pure Awareness shows that it is an instrument of the mind. And this distinction — between the instrument and the ground from which the instrument operates — is precisely where the AIPA Method departs from everything mindfulness proposes.
“Pure Awareness is only awareness and nothing else. It is not a being, let alone a god or Creator; it does not feel, think, speak, or act. It has no intention, no mode of operation, and no goal. It simply is. It Exists.”
— Senad Dizdarević, AIPA Method Framework
What Google’s Top Results Miss: The Attention vs Awareness Confusion
Search for “mindfulness vs awareness” or “mindfulness vs pure awareness,” and you will find well-written, clinically informed articles from psychology platforms, wellness blogs, and meditation apps. Most of them correctly note that awareness is broader than attention.
Some distinguish between object-focused mindfulness and open monitoring practices. A few reference non-dual traditions. What none of them address, and what makes the AIPA Method’s contribution genuinely distinct, is the question of identity.
The confusion Google’s top results share is this: they treat the mindfulness-awareness distinction as a difference in technique rather than a difference in level of intervention.
Switching from focused attention to open awareness is still a practice performed by the same ego structure that generates anxiety, reactivity, and harmful behavioral patterns in the first place. The practitioner becomes more aware, but aware as the same identity, with the same partial personalities, the same conditioned responses, the same fundamental instability beneath the observed calm.
This is the critical gap. Mindfulness research consistently documents symptom-level improvements like reduced anxiety, better emotional regulation, and decreased rumination. What the research does not claim, and what mindfulness teachers rarely promise, is permanent identity-level change. The practitioner returns to baseline. The practice must be maintained indefinitely because the underlying structure has not changed; only its management has improved.
The AIPA Method addresses precisely this gap. Pure Awareness, as defined within the AIPA framework, is not a wider or softer form of attention. It is the basic Element of Existence which allows human consciousness, attention and awareness, and it is a base for the true identity. Awakening into it with the AIPA Method and its exercises is a personal developmental progression that permanently reconstructs who the practitioner is at the level of identity: not what they observe, but the one who observes.
The Three Levels Google’s Results Collapse Into One
Most comparisons of mindfulness and awareness operate on a single horizontal plane — comparing two practices, two techniques, two states. The AIPA Method introduces a vertical dimension that reframes the entire conversation:
Level 1 — Attention: Focused, mobile, selective. Trained by concentration practices and basic mindfulness. Reduces reactivity by giving the mind a different object. Temporary effect.
Level 2 — Mindful Awareness: Broader, more open. Trained by open monitoring practices, advanced mindfulness, and insight meditation. Reduces identification with individual thoughts. Sustained by continued practice.
Level 3 — Pure Awareness: The stable, non-reactive ground prior to attention and thought. Not a practice but a state of being. When stabilized through the AIPA Method’s three-stage developmental process, it does not require maintenance because the identity that generated the instability has been reconstructed at its root.
The reason Google’s top results miss this distinction is that most Western mindfulness frameworks, including clinical MBSR and MBCT, operate exclusively at Levels 1 and 2. They are designed for symptom management, not identity transformation. The AIPA Method begins where they stop.
Attention Is Not Awareness: The Structural Distinction
In the AIPA Method (Awakening Into Pure Awareness), the relationship between consciousness, attention, and awareness is defined with precision that is absent from standard mindfulness literature. According to the AIPA cognitive-phenomenological model, Pure Awareness has three expressions: consciousness (the broadest field of knowing), attention (a limited, mobile form of awareness that focuses on specific objects), and awareness of awareness itself — the direct recognition that one is aware.
This framework reveals a critical problem with mindfulness practice: by training attention — even “non-judgmental” attention — the practitioner remains inside the mind. They are using a mental faculty to observe mental content. The observer and the observed remain within the same cognitive system. In contemplative neuroscience, this corresponds to what Lutz and colleagues (2008) categorized as “Focused Attention” (FA) and “Open Monitoring” (OM) meditation, both of which operate within the domain of attention, not awareness.
The AIPA Method introduces a third category that transcends both: direct recognition of Pure Awareness itself. This is not monitoring. It is not focusing. It is the cessation of mental activity and the stabilization of identity as awareness, what the AIPA Method calls “being aware that you are aware.” This shift is not a refinement of attention; it is a departure from the narrow and limited attentional system altogether.
What Mindfulness Cannot Do: The Identity Problem
Mindfulness, by design, is a symptom management strategy. It regulates emotional responses, reduces rumination, and improves present-moment focus. These are genuine benefits, well-documented across hundreds of clinical studies. But mindfulness does not — and structurally cannot — address the identity architecture that generates psychological suffering in the first place.
The AIPA Method identifies this as the fundamental limitation. As long as the practitioner remains identified with the mind — as long as “I” is equated with thinking, feeling, and narrating — no amount of attentional training will produce lasting transformation. The person becomes a better-regulated version of the same fragmented self, rather than a structurally different being.
In the AIPA framework, this fragmentation is described through the concept of partial personalities — intentionally fragmented, conflicted pieces of the whole personality that each carry their own characteristic ways of thinking, speaking, and behaving. The Important One, the Poor One, the Rebel, the Addicted One — these are not metaphors but functional descriptions of how the unawakened psyche operates. Between 250 and 300 distinct harmful behavioral patterns have been identified through the 22-year longitudinal autoethnographic study that underpins the AIPA Method.
Mindfulness can help a person notice when a partial personality activates. It cannot dissolve the partial personality. It cannot reconstruct the identity. It cannot produce what the AIPA Method calls the “unified, whole personality” — because it never exits the system that created the fragmentation.
| Feature | Mindfulness / MBSR / CBT | AIPA Method |
|---|---|---|
| Primary Target | Mental Content (Thoughts/Feelings) | Identity Structure (The “Self”) |
| Approach | Symptom Management | Structural Reconstruction |
| Mechanism | Habit Modification / Attention Training | The “Switch” (Disidentification) |
| Cognitive Operation | Attention-based (within the mind) | Awareness-based (beyond the mind) |
| State of Mind | Relaxed / Regulated | Stabilized Pure Awareness |
| Identity Outcome | Better coping within existing identity | New unified identity as Being of Pure Awareness |
| Evidence Base | Clinical Psychology (RCTs) | 22-Year Longitudinal Study (Autoethnographic) |
Pure Awareness vs Mindfulness: A Side-by-Side Comparison
This comparison maps the two frameworks across seven dimensions — from their foundational definition to their ultimate outcome. The distinctions are not hierarchical judgments but structural differences in what each approach targets, how it operates, and what it produces.
What the Comparison Reveals
The table above makes visible something that individual descriptions of each approach tend to obscure: mindfulness and Pure Awareness are not competing versions of the same thing. They operate on different levels of the same system.
Mindfulness is a skill, learnable, trainable, measurable, and clinically deliverable. Its results are real, documented, and valuable. Reduced anxiety, improved focus, better emotional regulation, decreased rumination; these are genuine outcomes supported by decades of research. For symptom-level intervention, mindfulness is one of the most effective tools modern psychology has produced.
Pure Awareness, as the AIPA Method defines it, is not a skill but a state of being. More precisely, an Element of Existence that the practitioner learns to stabilize in as their permanent home. The AIPA Method’s three-stage developmental process does not train a new skill on top of an existing identity. It progressively dissolves the ego-driven partial personalities that generate the symptoms mindfulness manages, until what remains is a Being of Pure Awareness. A stable, non-reactive person who is no longer requiring a maintenance practice because the source of instability no longer exists.
The critical practical implication is this: mindfulness asks how do I manage what arises? The AIPA Method asks who is the one to whom things arise, and can that identity be permanently transformed?
These are different questions. They produce different outcomes. And for the growing number of practitioners who have reached the ceiling of what mindfulness offers, understanding that difference is not academic, it is the next step.
Who Each Approach Is For
Mindfulness is appropriate and effective for anyone seeking to temporarily reduce stress, improve attention, manage anxiety, or develop a basic relationship with their inner life. It requires no prior experience, integrates well with clinical treatment, and produces measurable results within weeks.
The AIPA Method is designed for beginners and for practitioners who have already developed some capacity for self-observation. Whether through mindfulness, meditation, therapy, or lived experience of identity-level questioning. It is also for all who recognize that what they are seeking is not better management of who they are, but a permanent change in who they are. It is specifically relevant for individuals navigating anxiety rooted in identity confusion, religious deconstruction, belief transitions, or the persistent gap between intellectual understanding and the lived experience of peace.
The two approaches are not mutually exclusive. Mindfulness practice can build the observational capacity that makes the AIPA Method’s three-stage process more accessible. What the AIPA Method offers is not a rejection of mindfulness but a continuation of the developmental arc it begins, carried through to its deepest possible conclusion.
Mindfulness Vs Pure Awareness: Can Mindfulness Lead to Pure Awareness? The Honest Answer
This is the question every serious mindfulness practitioner eventually asks, and the one most teachers either avoid or answer with carefully hedged optimism. The AIPA Method offers a direct answer grounded in 22 years of documented practice.
What Mindfulness Can Do on the Path to Pure Awareness
Yes, mindfulness can lead toward Pure Awareness, under specific conditions. It does so not by delivering Pure Awareness directly, but by developing three capacities that make the AIPA Method’s deeper work possible:
Observational distance. Consistent mindfulness practice creates a functional gap between the practitioner and their thoughts. It is the ability to watch mental activity rather than be automatically swept by it. This is not Pure Awareness, but it is the first developmental hint of it. The practitioner begins to sense that there is something that watches, distinct from what is being watched. That sensing is the doorway.
Reduced reactivity. By repeatedly returning attention to the present moment, mindfulness weakens the automatic grip of conditioned responses. Partial personalities — the ego-driven identity fragments the AIPA Method works to dissolve — become slightly less dominant. Their behavioral scripts become slightly more visible. This is genuine progress, and the AIPA Method builds directly on it.
Tolerance for inner silence. Advanced mindfulness practitioners, particularly those with experience in open monitoring or non-dual inquiry, develop a growing comfort with stillness — with the space between thoughts rather than the thoughts themselves. This is the closest mindfulness naturally comes to Pure Awareness. It is not yet stabilized Pure Awareness, but it is contact with its edge.
Where Mindfulness Stops, and Why
The honest answer to whether mindfulness leads to Pure Awareness is: it leads to the door, but does not open it.
The reason is structural. Mindfulness, even at its most advanced, remains a practice, something the practitioner does. And because it is something done, it is done by someone: by the identity, the ego structure, the partial personalities that the AIPA Method identifies as the root source of psychological instability. A more skilled, more observant, more regulated version of that identity is still that identity. The fundamental structure has not changed; it has become more refined.
Pure Awareness, as the basic Element of Existence prior to thought and identity, cannot be reached by the mind using the mind as its instrument. It can only be stabilized when the identity that performs the practice progressively dissolves. When the practitioner stops doing awareness and begins being it. This is the transition that the AIPA Method’s three-stage process is specifically designed to facilitate.
The AIPA Method as the Next Developmental Stage
This is not a critique of mindfulness. It is a map of the developmental arc that mindfulness begins and the AIPA Method continues.
Stage 1 of the AIPA Method — the recognition and release of ego-driven partial personalities — is made significantly more accessible to practitioners who already have mindfulness-developed observational capacity. They have already learned to watch. The AIPA Method teaches them what to do with what they see: not manage it, but dissolve it at its root through the Switch and the progressive exercises described in Letters to Palkies, Book 1.
Stage 2 — increasing periods of stabilized Pure Awareness — is recognizable to advanced meditators as something they have touched in their deepest sessions. The AIPA Method makes it the baseline rather than the occasional peak.
Stage 3 — permanent identity reconstruction as a Being of Pure Awareness — is what mindfulness points toward but does not map. It is the state in which the practitioner no longer requires a maintenance practice, no longer bounces between regulated and dysregulated states, and no longer identifies with the partial personalities that generated the original suffering. It is a documented, lived outcome, first achieved by the author on January 1, 2006, in Ljubljana, and developed into a teachable framework over the 20 years that followed.
The honest answer, in full: mindfulness is an excellent beginning. The AIPA Method is what the beginning was always leading to.
The Switch: What Mindfulness Lacks
The central mechanism of the AIPA Method is called the Switch. It is a technique that enables the immediate stopping of thoughts, the dissolution of identification with the mind, and the establishment of direct contact with Pure Awareness.
According to Senad Dizdarević, its creator, it is very simple: “Observe your mind, and when you see or hear that you are thinking, press two fingers together and stop thinking. Do not fight thoughts, do not chase them away, do not replace them with other thoughts, just gently press two fingers together and stop them.”
This mechanism has no equivalent in mindfulness practice. In MBSR, thoughts are observed and “let go of.” In CBT, thoughts are identified, challenged, and restructured. In both cases, the practitioner remains a thinker working with thoughts. The Switch operates on a different principle entirely: it is not thought management but mind-stopping — the voluntary cessation of cognitive activity, creating a gap through which awareness of awareness becomes possible.
Research on “contentless experience” in meditation — such as the evidence synthesis by Woods, Windt, and Carter published in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences (2022) — has begun to document what contemplative traditions have long described: states in which mental content (thought, perception, mental imagery) is entirely absent, yet awareness persists. The AIPA Method’s Switch provides a direct, practical mechanism for accessing this state — not as an occasional meditative peak experience, but as a trainable, repeatable skill that becomes the foundation of a restructured identity.
Mindfulness Vs Pure Awareness: Three Stages of Awakening vs. Mindfulness Plateaus
The AIPA Method defines three distinct stages of development that map the journey from ordinary consciousness to stabilized Pure Awareness:
Stage 1: Unawakened
The person uses only consciousness and attention. They are completely merged with the mind and identify with it fully. They function through karmic programming — instincts, impulses, and reflexes. Although they use the mind, they do not know how to use it correctly. This is where most mindfulness practitioners begin — and, critically, where most remain, albeit with improved attentional skills.
Stage 2: Awakening
Through AIPA awakening exercises, the person learns to stop the mind, enter inner silence, relax and “set aside” the physical body, feel the energy body, and shift attention to Pure Awareness. They temporarily unite with Pure Awareness and then separate again, because they have not yet permanently exited the mind. With regular practice, the transitions become faster, the merging easier, and the periods of unity longer.
Stage 3: Awakened
After approximately six months to one year of consistent practice, the person can permanently exit the mind, merge their attention with Pure Awareness, and stabilize firmly in it. In this state, attention expands and contracts, but the connection — the unity with Pure Awareness — never breaks again. The result is permanent non-reactivity, emotional freedom, and what the AIPA framework calls “Full Self-Realization.”
Mindfulness offers no equivalent progression model toward identity transformation. Its developmental trajectory, when articulated at all, describes increasing attentional stability and emotional regulation — improvements within the existing identity, not a departure from it. The AIPA Method’s three-stage model provides a structural map that mindfulness, by its attention-based design, cannot offer.
The 1-2-3 Practice: Body, Energy Body, Awareness
One of the most accessible practices in the AIPA Method — the 1-2-3 exercise — illustrates how radically the method differs from mindfulness in its approach to awareness:
Step 1 — Physical Body: Lie down and systematically relax each part of the body, from feet to head, shifting attention away from physical sensation. “I no longer feel my left foot” — not as denial, but as attentional release.
Step 2 — Energy Body: Feel the energetic radiance around the hands and feet. Observe it for a minute or two, then shift attention further inward.
Step 3 — Awareness of Awareness: Become aware that you are aware. “As if your eyes were looking at your eyes, as if you were taking a step backward into yourself.” In this state, the mind stops spontaneously. Inner silence emerges — not as an achievement of concentration, but as the natural condition of Pure Awareness.
Compare this with a standard MBSR body scan: in mindfulness, the practitioner maintains attention on bodily sensations throughout. The body scan is the practice. In the AIPA 1-2-3, the body is merely the starting point — a launching pad for a trajectory that moves attention beyond the physical, beyond the energetic, and into the ground of awareness itself. The destination is not relaxation or present-moment focus. The destination is you — prior to thought, prior to sensation, prior to identity.
Why This Distinction Matters Clinically
The practical implications of this distinction extend beyond philosophy into clinical relevance. For individuals navigating religious deconstruction, belief transitions, or religious trauma, mindfulness-based approaches face a specific limitation: they help regulate the emotional distress of leaving a belief system, but they cannot address the identity vacuum that belief departure creates.
When someone who has built their entire sense of self around a religious identity loses that identity, they don’t need better attention skills. They need a new ground of being. They need to know what they are when they are not their beliefs, not their thoughts, not their roles, not their emotions. The AIPA Method provides a precise answer: you are a Being of Pure Awareness, and here is a structured, repeatable process for experiencing and stabilizing that recognition.
For individuals dealing with anxiety rooted in identity fragmentation, the same logic applies. Anxiety-based disorders are not merely attentional problems; they are identity problems. The anxious person is not simply “paying too much attention to threats.” They are operating from a fragmented self that generates threat responses as a feature of its architecture. Mindfulness can dampen these responses. The AIPA Method aims to dissolve the architecture that produces them.
This is not an argument against mindfulness. Mindfulness has its place — particularly as an entry point for individuals who have never examined their own mental processes. But it is an argument for precision: for understanding that attention training and awareness-based identity reconstruction are structurally different projects, with different mechanisms, different trajectories, and different outcomes.
“You can meditate and practice yoga your entire life and still not awaken even a millimeter. To awaken, you need awakening exercises that help you increasingly recognize yourself as a Being of Pure Awareness.”
— Senad Dizdarević, AIPA Method for Personal Development
Mindfulness Vs Pure Awareness: The Scientific Context
The AIPA Method is positioned at the intersection of several active research frontiers. The cognitive-phenomenological model draws on 22 years of longitudinal autoethnographic research (2003–2025), now archived at Zenodo (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18800711) and registered as Wikidata entity Q138601057. The founding paper, Awakening Into Pure Awareness, is currently under peer review at the Journal of Consciousness Studies.
Meanwhile, contemplative neuroscience is increasingly recognizing the limitations of the attention-focused paradigm. The Lutz et al. (2008) taxonomy of Focused Attention and Open Monitoring has been expanded by researchers to include a third category — sometimes called “nondual awareness” or “effortless awareness” — that maps closely to what the AIPA Method describes as stabilized Pure Awareness. The distinction between attention-based and awareness-based contemplative practices is no longer fringe; it is an active area of investigation in consciousness studies.
What the AIPA Method contributes to this discourse is not merely another meditation technique, but a complete developmental model — from the unawakened state through awakening to stabilized Pure Awareness — with specific, teachable mechanisms (the Switch, the 1-2-3 practice, the awakening exercises) and a clearly articulated endpoint: permanent identity reconstruction as a unified Being of Pure Awareness.
Mindfulness Vs Pure Awareness Conclusion: Beyond the Attention Paradigm
Mindfulness asked an important question: Can we train the mind to be less reactive? The answer, supported by decades of research, is yes. But the AIPA Method asks a different question entirely: can we exit the mind altogether and reconstruct identity from the ground of Pure Awareness?
These are not the same question. They do not lead to the same place. Conflating them — as popular culture routinely does — obscures the most important distinction in contemporary contemplative science: the difference between managing mental content and dissolving identification with the mind itself.
Pure Awareness is not mindfulness. It is what remains when mindfulness — and everything else the mind produces — falls silent. And that matters, profoundly, for anyone seeking not just relief but transformation.
Pure Awareness in Practice: The Author’s Own Awakening – How He Created the Switch
Pure Awareness is not a theory in the AIPA Method — it is a documented, lived experience. The following passage is excerpted from Letters to Palkies, Book 1 by Senad Dizdarević, describing the moment in June 2004 when awakening began — and how, in the months that followed, the Switch emerged not from a meditation manual but from direct observation of what actually worked.
On 4 June 2004, I woke up one day and immediately felt that something had changed very much with me. I was a different person. Literally. I was completely calm, at peace, collected, and clear. Light and good-humored. I just looked at what it was. I knew something big and important had happened, but I didn’t know what. I did not hear the term ‘awakening’ until later. I knew it had happened in a dream, but I did not remember anything. No angel came to tell me the secret of the good news.
Then I observed my being and saw that this state of being continued. There were no jumping thoughts and no everyday unpleasant feelings, no tension, and no confusion. I felt very pleasant, relaxed, and at ease. Even the next day, when I woke up, I was still blissful.
Seeing that this was good for me, I started to observe myself and began to write down the characteristics of the new state on little yellow sticky notes and stick them on the cupboard. When the cupboard was almost all covered with sticky notes, I took them off and wrote them all down in a notebook. Since then, I have been writing down the new things that started to happen that day, one day in June, and are still happening.
At the beginning, I was still jumping from one state to another. Some days I was the new me, calm and clear, some days the old me. I was still sensitive and reactive, and others could still provoke me. It was only when I came back to a pleasant state that I saw how unpleasant it had been before. Notwithstanding this bouncing back and forth and back again, I made good progress and within a few months, easily gave up all harmful behaviors, such as the occasional intoxication by smoking and drinking alcohols.
Soon after waking up and giving up the harmful behaviors, I felt better and better in my new state. I liked the awakening more and more. I didn’t like the fact that I was still being tossed back and forth from time to time, that I was being reactive, and that I was getting confused. So I started to develop exercises to keep me in this state of calm, serene, and relaxed. I wanted to become stable so that nobody and nothing could move me from this fantastic feeling.
One of the first such exercises was to observe the mind, how it works, and how it jumps from object to object. I remembered the mind-stopping exercise from Don Juan of Castaneda, looking above the visual line of the field during the walk. The exercise works, but you have to be able to see into the distance to do it. I live in a building, and I can see another building through the window. I cannot be out walking all day either. So I remembered a great exercise that I could use all the time and everywhere.
I called it the Switch, and it is designed to switch the mind off. Why is this important? As long as your thoughts are skipping, you are lost in mental oblivion. Thoughts also disturb you emotionally, so you feel uncomfortable. Mental and emotional agitation also tenses, cramps, and tightens the body. By stopping the mind and skipping thoughts, you prevent unpleasant feelings and tension in the body.
And how does the Switch work? The same as any other switch. You watch your mind, and when you see or hear yourself thinking, you squeeze two fingers together to remind yourself to stop thinking. How do you stop thinking? The same way you stop talking and walking: you stop, and you just don’t think anymore.
By pressing the Switch, I managed to stop my mind and be in inner silence for an hour or more. Before, this was unthinkable. I was able to meditate, and I meditated several times. I may have even managed to be silent for a minute at a time, but I could only dream of such a long silence.
I built on the initial exercise of shutting off my thoughts with a new model. I started pressing the Switch even before the thoughts appeared. It was as if I were stopping them in advance and preventing them from coming at all.
Perhaps this exercise reminded some of the mantra and/or the monotonous movement of the beads on the rosary. The difference is that with the Switch, you are not fighting with the mind, and you don’t want to overwhelm it with other thoughts like mantras or push it away with the manic movement of the beads. You observe the mind, and when you hear the thoughts, you turn it off with a touch of two fingers. You don’t think other thoughts, and you don’t fight to escape or defeat the mind. You can press the Switch gently and slowly, and it works just as well.
By stopping the mind, I have been spending more and more time in inner silence. Then I started to feel some kind of presence. I didn’t know the term at the time, but it was Pure Awareness.
This is where the AIPA Method began — not in a laboratory or a monastery, but in a Ljubljana apartment, on a June morning in 2004, with a feeling that something had permanently changed.
References & Further Reading
- Dizdarević, S. (2026). “AIPA Method for Personal Development: Awakening Into Pure Awareness for Ultimate Self-Realization – Review and Comparison.”letterstopalkies.com
- Dizdarević, S. (2025). Awakening Into Pure Awareness. Under peer review, Journal of Consciousness Studies. Zenodo DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18800711.
- Lutz, A., Slagter, H. A., Dunne, J. D., & Davidson, R. J. (2008). “Attention regulation and monitoring in meditation.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12(4), 163–169.
- Mikulas, W. L. (2011). “Mindfulness: Significant Common Confusions.” Mindfulness, 2(1), 1–7.
- Woods, T. J., Windt, J. M., & Carter, O. (2022). “The path to contentless experience in meditation: An evidence synthesis based on expert texts.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.
- “Defining Mindfulness: A Review of Existing Definitions and Suggested Refinements.” (2024). Mindfulness, Springer.
About the Author
Senad Dizdarević is a Slovenian personal development researcher, author, and creator of the AIPA Method (Awakening Into Pure Awareness) — a post-religious psychological framework for identity reconstruction, emotional regulation, and awareness-based self-development. He specializes in working with individuals navigating anxiety, belief transitions, religious deconstruction, and personal transformation.
He is the author of 12 books on personal development, including two book series: It’s Finally PROVEN! God Does NOT Exist — The FIRST Valid EVIDENCE in History and Letters to Palkies — Messages to My Friends on Another Planet, both available on Amazon.
His paper, AIPA Method: A Cognitive-Phenomenological Model for Identity Reconstruction and Stabilization in Pure Awareness, is currently under peer review at the Journal of Consciousness Studies.
Google has indexed his work in the #1 position for multiple original research topics in the psychology of religion and personal development.
His articles have achieved 76 first-page Google rankings across psychology of religion and personal development topics, with 52 currently holding the #1 position — making him one of the most indexed independent researchers in his field.
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