Edward’s Diary Entry 112: Self-Awareness Diagrams - 3

Self-Awareness 3+: Now if all goes well and we continue to work on our minds and seek its source, we come to a possibility as shown in the S-A 3+ diagram below.  

Here, there is much more coherence in the mind, from the basic urges and impulses at 0, through bodily desires and urges at 1, feelings, emotions and sentiments at 2, and thoughts and the thinking process at 3. Self-Awareness is not separated and difficult to access in the mind any more, being shown in bold and connected with a strong bracket that focuses on each thought, feeling, sensation and impulse.  The mind has been put in better order, and the subject in question  is actively working on expanding his or her consciousness or awareness to all aspects of life within and without.

This kind of work is still very much physical and mental, and has nothing to do with anything spiritual. It involves using the initial separation in the mind between Awareness (“I”) and things experienced (“me”). Attention to breathing and bodily processes. Attention to the operations of the mind and the detection of conditioned responses and reactions. Support devices include the stilling of bodily functions, walking and watching the mind, sitting and watching the mind (meditation, contemplation, repetition of questions or mantras, various simple yogic practises such as listening to chants, cleansing the elements, cleansing the nadis, practising Vichara, concentrating on the Virtues, etc.).

Our analogy in modern-day terms would be to describe our body as the hardware in a workstation – the PC, screens, peripherals and work chair. The content of our minds is the software or programming in the computer. And our Self-Awareness is when somebody actually sits down in that comfortable work chair and uses the equipment for a useful job! Our problem is that when no one is sitting there, the programmes run in self-operation mode, as if we were intelligent (we are!), but we are absent and doing something else! We need to sit down at the workstation and actually do some work for all this to make sense. 

During daily life and at special times, perhaps, there is Attention to the wanderings of the mind and the exercise of control over such wanderings: for every un-wanted thought, a questioning thought is used to revert the thought-flow back to the Source of the mind, as we want to expand our Self-Awareness back along the crooked line to the question mark. A thought will come, it is dismissed with a question as to the origin of such a thought. A feeling wells up, it is noted in the mind by applying S-A: is the feeling the product of a beneficial thought or a negative or useless thought? If beneficial, the feeling is good; if not the feeling is bad. An urge or impulse arises: it is questioned and put in order. 

And there's more in the pipeline, stay tuned....