Check out definitions if you need insight on any phrase:
You have awareness of….
What is the “you” that can be aware? This “you,” is your consciousness, your “Me,” your inner being, soul, essence. When we say that “you” are aware, it means that this consciousness is perceiving something.
Now if awareness is “lost,” that means that your consciousness was “lost” in the experience of this world. Consciousness is never really “lost,” but rather consciousness stops being aware of consciousness (you stop being aware of you). This isn’t always unpleasant. You can be lost in a very pleasurable experience. But when awareness of consciousness is lost, ego emerges. The “ego” is the self created when the awareness is lost in the thought/emotion loops. The ego always feels defensive. It recognizes that it is not “real” and thus feels very uncomfortable with that fact. It mostly busies itself in seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. It makes use of your body and mind mostly to survive, defending it against apparent threats. Most of these threats aren’t “real,” but they are certainly “real” to the ego, because the ego is the identification with the emotional mind states. So the ego is constantly mentally obsessed with trying to figure everything out, judging it, planning, and defending itself against life. This is exhausting.
You become aware when you suddenly see the whole apparatus working. Awareness is extremely powerful. If its energy is no longer going to the ego apparatus, its energy is basically integrating back into you, directed back towards consciousness.
True meditation is being aware of that which is aware (i.e. turning awareness back on consciousness. This feels akin to going deeper, or going inside).
Now when you are able to maintain awareness, you gain immense power over your thoughts and emotions. You start being able to direct your thoughts and feelings towards whatever you want (by directing your thoughts, you activate your emotions, creating emotional momentum in a good direction). If you are aligned with your inner being (i.e. aware of your consciousness), then this becomes an incredible experience. You still “think” and “feel,” but it is filled with joy and clarity and trust and pleasure.
You can use your awareness to create things – that would be known as manifesting. If you understand that most “things” do not exist in outside the confines of your mind, you will realize that you are “creating” your own “reality.” All of “outside” is just a reflection of “inside.” Most people take their past and project it into the future. This is how the ego operates. It is trying to predict bad things so it can avoid them. The problem is that you are essentially taking the defined past and turning it into a predictable future. Of all the possible futures (they truly are infinite), why would you choose to think and feel one that doesn’t feel good? If you’re worrying all the time, you’re putting your energy towards something THAT YOU DON’T WANT!
This inner dialogue creates your reality. So if you are directing your awareness towards things which you don’t like or don’t want, you are actually bringing them closer to you. Your true power as a human being is to “imagine” the reality that you want and direct your awareness towards that imagination. If you practice this, you will inspire thoughts and feelings that are aligned with that future reality. You begin to live the life ahead of time. When you live the life ahead of time, everything else begins to fill in around you.
I will mention that you don’t even need to “decide” what this future looks like. You can focus on what this future will feel like. You just need to feel good. When you feel good you attract goodness. This goodness will manifest not only in more good feelings, but in abundant goodness even in material possessions.
So to recap, awareness occurs when consciousness is created. When consciousness is created, it becomes aware of all of these thoughts and emotions and experiences that are floating by it. It no longer gets lost in them. It no longer resists them. It no longer reacts to them. When the energy of awareness is taken from them, they slowly quiet down. When you reach that place of quiet (of neutral resistance), you can become a powerful creator using directed thought to feel a certain reality ahead of time.
An interesting sub-note:
Feeling “self-conscious” is actually a higher level of awareness that pure unconsciousness, but its still cripplingly uncomfortable because the inner being is still stuck in the thought/emotional loop.