Awareness is the art of knowing what is going on, internally and externally.
How many times have you entered a room and can remember nothing about its contents or who was there?
How often do you drive home and can remember little about the journey?
That's because you weren't there, you were playing with a favorite toy, the mind.
Awareness bring you back to the now, puts you in the state of the observer, the cool dude that knows the score, who doesn't get caught unaware.
Awareness is in this passage from Jon Kabat-Zinn:
"Guess what?
When it comes right down to it, wherever you go, there you are.
Whatever you wind up doing, that's what you've wound up doing.
Whatever you are thinking right now, that's what's on your mind.
Whatever has happened to you, it has already happened.
The important question is how are you going to handle it.
In other words," Now what?"
Like it or not, this moment is all we really have to work with." (Kabat-Zinn 2005)