Self-Awareness state 0
You “know” what dreamless sleep is like. You’re
very tired, you fall asleep, you have no dreams, and you wake up. You have no
idea where you were, no memory of dreaming or thinking, nothing. You went into
deep dreamless sleep. That’s Consciousness state 0. Nothingness. Perhaps the
mind goes back to the Source. The personal individuality is non-existent, and
yet you “reincarnate” and come back to the same world when you wake up: the same
world inside your head and in the world of people and things. And it happens again
and again every night. We don’t know what it is, but if we reflect on it, we
know we have had this personal experience, we “know” we have disappeared and
have come back again. So this is the idea of dreamless sleep. It is “Self-Awareness
0” or simply “The Unknown”.
Self-Awareness state 1
REM stage sleep is the dreaming phase. You know
you dream. Sometimes you remember your dreams, sometimes you don’t. Sometimes
you dream more often, sometimes less. We all agree that human beings have a
state called dreaming, and we see this state in our pets too, with movements,
spasm or sounds. So we know more about this state because some consciousness is
present, and we remember it. It is Self-Awareness 1. “Awareness of the Dream
World”.
Self-Awareness state 2
So what happens when we “wake up” from sleeping
and dreaming? We enter Self-Awareness 2, called “normal waking existence”,
“normal consciousness”, in which we immediately start thinking, feeling, sensing
and acting as so-called “normal humans beings”, and the norm is whatever a
given culture or civilisation says is “normal”. In this state, unlike dreaming
– in which we are passive and cannot harm anyone – our mindset, our thinking
process, and our impulses and feelings are all directed outwards to what we
call the physical world around us (we are conditioned to accept it as reality)
and the representative of this state of consciousness, the Ego, starts to differentiate
between what we call “good and bad” and all the other pairs of opposites. My
good is not your good; my bad is never exactly your bad, and all the arguments
ensue from this egocentric positioning. With this individualistic, “me-against-the-world”
attitude, we can actually do harm to others, to ourselves, to things and other
life-forms, and of course to the Planet itself. Today, anyone with any level of
“environmental” awareness knows this. Since the 1940s, man has the means to
destroy the planet, and if bombs won’t do it, then gradual climate change,
pollution, overpopulation or famine may. This is part of Reality, and it is
normal and natural. But this is because we, as human beings, are not really fully
CONSCIOUS or SELF-AWARE. The whole point of any human evolution, development, mental
or spiritual growth, is to become more human, more conscious, more SELF-AWARE. This
state 2, “Normal Waking Consciousness”, is not enough to ensure peace and
prosperity for all. When we look at the world around us we see this. It is
egocentric, egoic, separatist, and non-integrated. We wonder why there are wars
and killings in the world, but we accept and take for granted that we can get
angry with someone we love or with a neighbour or a stranger. This Normal Waking
State depends on ethnic, cultural, social, family and personal conditioning. It
is merely an initial state of being human, like the raw material for humanness.
But even so, every human being (by the mere fact of being born human) already has
a higher state of consciousness (just as the United Nations says we already have
natural inherent or inborn “rights”). Perhaps better to say the higher consciousness
is already in us. The trick is that we don’t know it yet. So level 2 is a
dark state of consciousness (see "Levels" page No. 1) (much like sleeping, except that we’re in an
active state) in which the human being presents an EGO or “I”, which is generally
not interested in further analysis, because this analysis may be painful and
dangerous to this EGO or “I”, which wants protection at all costs. It is not
that mankind is totally unconscious, it’s that we can – and must – become more
conscious to become more human and continue our “evolution”.
Self-Awareness state 3
SELF-AWARENESS state 3, also called PRESENCE,
DE-CONDITIONED CONSCIOUSNESS, THE ETERNAL NOW, or PRESENT MOMENT LIVING, or
ACCEPTING WHAT IS - AS IT IS, or REAL HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS – this is what we at
IS-AD mean by “SELF-AWARENESS”. Self-Awareness SEES, SENSES and FEELS that 1)
my body is not all that I am; 2) my feelings are not all that I am comprised
of; 3) my thoughts are not necessarily ME either: some I control, some I do not;
4) In fact, there is at times an Observer in me, an Awareness in me, that
WATCHES or WITNESSES these natural functions as they operate and sometimes –
depending on our state of mind or being – is taken over and engulfed by the
experience, and sometimes stands apart from the experience and simply observes
it. This is an initial state of the deconditioned mind, which is freer
than a conditioned mind and better able to perceive “Reality”. Self-Awareness seems
to want to be part of the human being, we are born with a potential for it. But
the question is, does the human being want to accept and cultivate Self-Awareness?
Maybe Shakespeare was asking this when he put the famous words in Hamlet’s
mouth, “To be, or not to be; that is the question.”
This is the basic thesis of this blog. That it
is possible to cultivate a higher state of mind, a state of Self-Awareness, in
which conditioning (uncontrolled habits, behaviour patterns, wrong thinking,
wrong feeling, wrong acting) can be observed, detected… and corrected with
patience and perseverance.
So what experiences of “Self-Awareness” have
you had? Ask yourself: How do I know if I am more AWARE? Have I had the sensation of a sudden
cessation of thinking and actually just seen something as if it were the
first time ever? Do I really listen when someone I love talks to me?
Have I heard that bird singing even though the street was full of busy traffic?
Do I have to be a poet to enjoy this, or can anyone do it? Am I simply too busy
with my “problems”, my “thoughts”, my “hurry-hurry-have-to-get-there-on-time”,
or “why did that stupid neighbour give me another scowl this morning?” Am I
trapped in thought and stressed out most of the time? Or do I have a modicum of
Awareness that makes me happier? Your comments please.
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