Awareness is the way we each experience ourselves as a conscious being. Consciousness is continually shifting, bringing up some things while simultaneously obscuring others. Awareness is the act of observing what the light of consciousness is focused on. Understanding the forces that direct awareness helps us integrate the diversity of our thoughts, needs, and motivations.
Topics in the text:
Awareness and Desire
Awareness and States of Mind
Awareness is highly state-dependent and shifts with our motivations, altering both our perception and memory in order to focus on getting our current needs met. It is tempting, and dangerously facile, to assume that the content of our current awareness is singularly true or of greater value than the aspects of our self, which is temporally out of awareness. We all have a wide range of needs, values, and motivations that are not always congruent and often impossible to hold in awareness, simultaneously. The power of awareness includes making real whatever is in the current focus; but there are many real needs and motivations just waiting for their moment in the reality of our awareness. Full self-actualization requires that we remain connected to the diversity of our nature and not singular in our awareness.
Awareness and Desire
Motivation, in striving to satisfy our needs and desires, has a profound effect on awareness. It sets our awareness by focusing that awareness on our desired goals and purposes. This focus can often be myopic and illusory. When we are hungry we see food and when we are trying to avoid harm we see only danger. Understanding the relationship between motivation and awareness can help us widen our horizon. Often what we need lies outside the narrow focus set by our motivation. Expanding our awareness even while we are in need is critical to flourishing.
By understanding the relationship between awareness and motivation, we can deepen our appreciation for what we need as well as enhancing our ability to manage our awareness. Our current awareness tells us our current needs and desires; however, we are not of one mind and shifting awareness can tell us about other needs and desires that are latent at that particular moment. Without control over our awareness, we are at the mercy of our transient needs and the resulting motivations.
Self-awareness is more than just awareness of our current needs and desires, but includes being free to see the world through an expanded lens. Truly being self-aware is being able to apprehend our shifts in motivation and awareness within the context of our life experiences. This aids us in shifting between focusing on the demands and opportunities of our current circumstances within the broader perspectives of our overarching values and purpose. This exploration requires being able to manage our awareness, shifting between competing needs, desires, and motivations. Without being aware of, or able to, contain disparate desires, self -understanding will be limited and we could remain focused on only a limited range of our full potential.
Awareness and States of Mind
Enhancing awareness includes developing the capacity both to focus our awareness and shifting that awareness. By shifting our awareness, we can attend to alternative states of mind. Focusing awareness is exploring the state of mind one is in at that particular time. By focusing our awareness, we can more clearly grasp our current situation. Daniel Goleman, in his book Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence, explores how focusing helps us learn to flourish.
The capacity to balance between shifting and focusing awareness is essential to flourishing. Obsessing is the result of too much focus within one state of mind and distractibility is too much shifting between states of mind. Awareness is a tool to be used, developed, and cultivated. Without control over your awareness, you have no control over what you know and when you know it.
The influence of awareness on our perception and the content of our mind is related to the nature of the self. The self is not a unity and our experience is an illusion of a unitary sense of self. This illusion is fueled by the nature of our memory retrieval, which is a very selective process. Memory is highly state-dependent and when we shift our awareness, we alter what we will be able to remember. Marcel Proust poetically reveals the self-awareness in time when he relates how a smell could transport him back to his childhood. Developing awareness starts with an acceptance that different states of mind bring forth different memories, feelings, self-images, and world views.
Shifting awareness reveals aspects of our nature and motivations that might otherwise remain obscure. Through dream analysis, Sigmund Freud felt he had found an opaque mirror that could be cleared, bringing into awareness our deepest desires and motivations. Although the positivism of Freudian psychoanalysis has limiting rigidness analogous to religious orthodoxy, Freud’s creativity in questioning assumptions about our motivations helps each of us expand our self-awareness. Carl Jung Link journeyed into the deep psyche in order to explore our “collective unconscious,” his term for humankind’s shared psychological nature. We experience Jung’s notion of this shared transcendent psyche whenever we open our awareness to the coincidences in our life. We do not need to endorse either of these pioneers’ specific narratives in order to expand our awareness, because merely the questing of what we know and how we know it, as well as what we do not know, opens our awareness. Curiosity is the most accessible psychological stance for opening up to an expanded awareness. Curiosity begins the process of increasing awareness. It allows us to accept the possibility of unknown layers of awareness with openness and fearlessness. This stance helps us embrace an experience of different subjective realities.
Being cognizant of our awareness is critical to apprehending states of mind that open us to the transcendent. Such awareness of our awareness is the threshold to awakening and awakening can be an experience of the Transcendent. Thich Nhat Hanh shares how being mindful of the present moment opens us to the transcendent in the present. Through meditation, prayer, ritual, and esthetics, we set aside our limited self-perspective view of things and open the doors of perception to experience the transcendent.