Awareness is a big word, and lots of people idealize it, but in Buddhism awareness is considered something actually pretty simple.

When you look at an object (or a mental object), what really happens is, the features (signs) are recognized and checked against the storage of past experiences, and based on the matching associations an object is identified. This process is cyclic, meaning, the features are constantly re-evaluated against the memories, and the results of the lookup are fed-back into the same process, finding secondary and tertiary associations and so on. This cyclic process is what creates the experience of "awareness".

When you turn attention to your own mind, nothing really changes except of the external input, or a mental object input, you have a re-representation of your own mind (your mind-model) as input. This proceeds in the same cyclic manner and creates the experience of "self-awareness".

On each iteration of the cycle, all we have is the content of mind, which is the result of looking up the input from sensory organ, plus the content of mind from the previous iteration, against the storage of past experiences. So on every step of the cycle, the content of mind is literally mind-made, it is comprised of whatever past experiences that happened to associate with the input. And if you think about it, this content is not "seen" by any "awareness" or "witness" (like the Brahmins used to think). Instead, this content of mind is matched against memory, but as soon as the matching associations are found, they slowly supersede whatever content we had on the previous iteration, and become the new state.

So even though we are fooled into thinking that objects of mind are "seen" by "awareness", in reality this seeming "awareness" is just the next set of matching associations coming up from the memory. There is no "I" or "awareness" there, just a train of associations following one another, morphing from one to another.