I love your answer Robert. As the questioner sounds like a knowledge seeker, I would offer them another angle.
It sounds like there is an effort of sorts too experience something specific, or be a certain way, that implicitly they believe they are not already.
I think that is why they suggest the idea that they may be "capturing water in a sieve." I agree with Robert that there is nothing to do about this, there is just the experience of aliveness and that is what is happening in it, however in so far as there is an imagined "problem" there is a corresponding solution.
What might be helpful to the questioner is the idea of discriminating awareness from the reflection of awareness. The experience of "noticing the noticer" is not the infinite loop it appears to be, but rather the seeming difference between awareness (actionless knowing) and the mind/intellect/I sense which is its reflection. This is not a real split, it just looks like one. However, it is useful temporarily to distinguish between that actionless knowing (which is just "what is" apparently knowing itself), and the belief in individuality that results from taking the mind to be "me."
In my experience, this discrimination between the reality of "what is" and imagination (the idea of separateness and incompleteness), resolved this dilemma. It didn't do so by magic or by changing experience, it did so by knowledge, recognizing the difference between self and objects, and then also removing that idea. That's the crucial part. If that idea, the teaching remnant so to speak, is not removed, then all we have done is Replace one version of not being awake with another better looking version of also not being awake. That better looking version may look better, but it's worse because we actually think we are awake (a.k.a. something special) when in fact we have just adopted a more pleasing but equally false self image.
I love your answer Robert. As the questioner sounds like a knowledge seeker, I would offer them another angle.
It sounds like there is an effort of sorts too experience something specific, or be a certain way, that implicitly they believe they are not already.
I think that is why they suggest the idea that they may be "capturing water in a sieve." I agree with Robert that there is nothing to do about this, there is just the experience of aliveness and that is what is happening in it, however in so far as there is an imagined "problem" there is a corresponding solution.
What might be helpful to the questioner is the idea of discriminating awareness from the reflection of awareness. The experience of "noticing the noticer" is not the infinite loop it appears to be, but rather the seeming difference between awareness (actionless knowing) and the mind/intellect/I sense which is its reflection. This is not a real split, it just looks like one. However, it is useful temporarily to distinguish between that actionless knowing (which is just "what is" apparently knowing itself), and the belief in individuality that results from taking the mind to be "me."
In my experience, this discrimination between the reality of "what is" and imagination (the idea of separateness and incompleteness), resolved this dilemma. It didn't do so by magic or by changing experience, it did so by knowledge, recognizing the difference between self and objects, and then also removing that idea. That's the crucial part. If that idea, the teaching remnant so to speak, is not removed, then all we have done is Replace one version of not being awake with another better looking version of also not being awake. That better looking version may look better, but it's worse because we actually think we are awake (a.k.a. something special) when in fact we have just adopted a more pleasing but equally false self image.