Awareness

In order to build an understanding of your world you must first be aware of it. The more aware you are the greater your understanding can be. On a basic level you must be aware of of your senses and emotions. You should notice the colours, shapes, smells and sounds you experience and the emotional states they create in you. But you must also go much further than this. You must be conscious of the things you find in the world: The grass, the trees, the walls, creatures and people around you.

Even this is still only the beginning. You must be aware of your predictions on how these objects will behave, of their essence, able to see at a glance what other people are feeling, be aware of the emotions in their faces.

As your awareness increases will you realize that though some of your awareness is hard-wired, much of it is flexible to a massive degree. As you look at these words you are reading, you are aware instantly of what each word means, as quickly as if the word ‘tree’ were a tree. The awareness of reading skills is only now becoming common around the world, it’s certainly not ‘hard wired’.

Armed with this knowledge, you will go on to develop whole new categories of awareness. Some skilled clairvoyants build an awareness of a social field, they can almost literally see in the interactions between people their hopes and fears and dreams.

You will eventually understand that all of your awareness, from light and sound up to the awareness of political ambition in the face of a politician is an awareness not of the real world, but of your interpretation of the real world. Of the map, the model in your mind.

Finally, you will come not only to understand this on an intellectual level but also to sense it, be as aware of the limitations of your model of a tree as you are of the tree itself while you look up at it in awe. You will literally see that nothing you have ever been aware of really exists. All your consciousness can ever actually be aware of is the state of it’s own systems.

We can roughly divide this path in three inter-connected stages.

Perception Awareness

During February 2008 we discussed ways to increase our awareness of our perception.

Guided Meditation File 1 – Perception – Attention

Articles

Self Awareness

During October 2008 we plan to discuss ways to increase our self awareness, our self-knowledge, to improve our vision of ourselves.

Reality Modelling

During June 2009 we plan to discuss ways to increase our ability to accurately model our environment, and to be more aware of our internal model of the universe.