One way to distinguish between awareness and what we are aware of is to consider the process of time, versus the patterns being generated.

As mobile organisms, we have a sequential, judgmental process of perception, that is necessary to navigate our environment, so we think of time as the point of the present moving past to future, but the reality is that change turns future to past. Potential, actual, residual. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.

So there is no physical dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, in order to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy.

Consequently the process goes from past to future forms, as these patterns rise and fall, like so many waves, future to past.

So our awareness is like a process, going past to future, while the thoughts generated go future to past.

It is like the light of a movie projector, going from prior to succeeding frames, as these frames come and go.

Lives also go birth to death, being in the future to being in the past, while life goes onto the next generation, shedding the old.

Now we desire immortality as a continuation of our particular point of view and narrative, but since the only actual reality is this present moment, the only immortality is that under all the diverse lenses through which this light of awareness shines, it is the same light. See and connect with the I in the ones around you and realize that is immortality.