The term “bare awareness” does not occur in Bhante Sujato’s translations, so we are into idiosyncratic views. With that in mind, I offer the following:
When I was younger I thought a lot. This made it hard to catch a ball. As a result, I spent a lot of time thinking on the bench as my teammates scurried about the baseball field throwing and hitting things at each other. I later learned to say to others that “I see slowly”. This helped them understand how someone could be so daft and clumsy as to fumble a ball. This slow seeing happens because my vision is so bad that the cognitive processes of name and form and perception and feeling take very much longer in my brain than in others. That slowness made it hard to catch a ball since the ball hit me before I perceived it. Baseball was humiliatingly painful.
Later, much later in life, after decades of meditation, I was in the kitchen reaching for something in the cupboard. As I reached, I knocked something accidentally out of the cupboard and reflexively just caught it. There was no name. No form. No feeling. Hardly any perception. In fact, there was just catching. I then looked down and observed that I had caught the pepper mill. And that observation and consciousness of what I had caught took longer than the catching. Someone who could not catch had caught something. With bare awareness.
Had I practiced catching pepper mills? No.
Had I known what I was catching? No.
Did I make a choice? Not really. It was more an action spurred by the simplest awareness.
Was I conscious of what I caught? No.
Was I aware of catching? Yes. Barely.
Was there contact? Only after I caught the mill.
Was there origin of contact? Yes. There was a sudden shift of awareness to encompass what was later perceived as a pepper mill.
Where was “I”? Somewhere in the middle, perhaps. But not as I. There really wasn’t anything left over from catching.
Is this an attainment? No. I see people do such things everyday.
I find this action spurred out of bare awareness related to but not quite the same as contemplation of MN10. During contemplation there is simple observation without intervention. One does not catch peppermills. One observes the fall.
It is experiences like this that spark an interest in in Ven. Brahmali’s recent post on the nature of free will: