Step 2: Awareness

What Do We Mean By Awareness?

Awareness is the stage in the Cycle where we make meaning out of the flurry of Sensations arising within us at the moment. In order to navigate the world, we have to develop a map.

• We have to break up the seamless reality into parts and wholes, to name them, to locate where we are in the world, and how we can find what we need in the world.

• Although we’ve already blasted Mind (or Ego) for its misleading stories, its shoulds, and its getting between us and raw, living experience, we need to give Ego a little love for what it’s good for.

• Ego is a set of tools, functions, for getting around in the world. As such, everything in Ego has its helpful uses and its drawbacks.

• In the Awareness step, we use the functions of Ego that have to do with naming, identifying, storytelling, and other kinds of thinking that give us the rich maps of the world that we use to navigate. We let Ego, that great Drama Queen, strut her stuff, and then, we learn how to use her well and what to watch out for.

• Ego grows out of our emerging abilities to distinguish between ourselves and others, to learn our common language for others, objects, places, & actions, to communicate our needs, to negotiate interpersonal situations, to achieve tasks big and small, to define a role for ourselves in the world, and to learn higher-order concepts that help us map the world in more-complex ways.

• All of Ego’s functions involve the creation of meaning, whether that be the meanings of names, labels, roles, and rules, or the complex meanings we attribute to aspects of the world and our place in it.

Watch a one-year-old sometime, reach, again and again, for a toy or ball or a blade of grass. There is an intensity of fascination and focus, as the infant builds neural pathways of sensation, perception, and motor coordination. Our entire childhoods are filled with millions of such moments, as we slowly and intently develop neural networks of greater complexity and facility.

If you think of how we make the journey from the state of infantile wonder at all the buzzing, booming sensations that surround us, to the advanced state of intellectual, behavioral, interpersonal, occupational, communal development that we reach as adults, we can admire Ego greatly. Think of how many sensory, motor, imaginal, emotional, and cognitive skills we have practiced, over and over, in the growth from infant to adult in order to have this set of patterns and habits that we call Ego! Breathtaking!

So, when working on the Awareness Stage, observe the remarkable process of meaning-making that arises naturally that helps us makes sense of our Sensations and carries us along towards Need-Fulfillment.

Some Awareness Stucknesses:

Honesty vs. Deflection/Denial: None of us gets out of childhood unscathed by judgement. Everyone learns, consciously and unconsciously, what is acceptable and what is a no-no to the people that matter most to us. As we take in these values, we learn to curb our Awareness accordingly. This self-censorship becomes pretty unconscious, particularly if it is developed through implicit disapproval, rather than overt punishment or discipline. We can also develop blocks to Awareness of certain feelings and insights, if we see those feelings or sentiments acted-out in dangerous or frightening ways. Thus, Awareness is prone to the stuckness of Deflection/Denial.

So, when practicing Awareness, notice any little signs that you are censoring, avoiding, or misreading Sensations to sidestep Awareness of feelings or thoughts that have been prohibited to you growing up. See what it’s like to try on forbidden emotions or insights when you think you notice this.

Persona Vs. Shadow: This stuckness grows directly out of Denial/Deflection. In that crucial period of development between ages 0-18, our identities unfold and are formed. Depending on the family, as well as the larger culture, that we grew up in, qualities may be reinforced or punished, celebrated or denigrated, ignored or attended to, and cultivated or discouraged.

Any punishment, judgement, encouragement, or inattention from our environment can lead us to either exaggerate or squelch some part of our natural selves. We come to identify with those aspects of us that get us the most reinforcement, or at least, those aspects of us that get us the most attention, even bad attention. At the same time, we will dis-identify or alienate what gets us punishment or no attention.

This process of identification and alienation leads us swallow whole certain ideas about ourselves, positive or negative. The swallowing-whole is called Introjection. When we are young, we are not capable of chewing up, discerning, and properly-digesting the messages we get from our environment, and we take in messages in a black/white fashion with no critique or perspective. This introjecting becomes a stuck attitude, identity, or belief about ourself.

The identity pieces that we introject make up what C.G. Jung first named “Personas”.

Conversely, any qualities that we do not incorporate into our personas, either because they are punished, or because they are not attended to, supported, modeled, or recognized, get deposited in what Jung called our “Shadow”.

So, in the Awareness Stage, be prepared to meet aspects of identity that don’t seem either familiar or safe. Pay particular attention to thoughts, images, feelings, or fantasies that seem unusual, unseemly, immoral, or out-of-character for you. Remember that a healthy Mensch has many sides to her, and can be different people in situations that call for different responses.

We are trying to balance our personas and shadows, to lessen the stereotypical Persona responses, and to increase our awareness and ability to express our Shadow selves where they would do some good. This is mature integration. Never mind trying to be a Good Mensch or a Bad Mensch, focus on being a Whole Mensch.

Needs Vs. Wants: This Awareness stuckness is a special case of Deflection. That is, when we encounter unpleasant Sensations or Emotions, we can fake ourselves out by shifting into a desire for a palliative balm, particularly one that has worked in past to cover or soothe the uncomfortable Sensation.

This is a perfectly-normal consequence of our biological preference for pleasure, not pain. However, when we use it often, because we’ve never learned to sit with uncomfortable sensations or emotions, we start to create false-needs, automatic deflections from the real need.

This Deflection is one of the bases of addiction. That is, when we swap out actual Awareness of true Needs for Awareness of Wants, we can become addicted to the Wants. The work at this stuckness is to re-connect with true Needs, and to see through and let go of the diversionary Wants.

Awareness' Deeper Meanings

The Birth of Meaning and the Good Problem:

"Bats can hear shapes.

Plants can eat light.

Bees can dance maps.

We can hold all these ideas at once and feel both heavy and weightless with the absurd beauty of it all."

— Jarod K. Anderson

Awareness, when we practice it, intuitively-arising from Sensation, represents Virgin Birth, the appearance out of nowhere of meaning, import, image, idea, feeling, and motivation. As Rupert Spira points out, we don’t know what Consciousness is, really, yet it is the whole of what we know. As such, Awareness work is opening to the great, self-aware, constantly-changing tableau of all of experience. In this remarkable experiential field, we see Sensations, Images, Thoughts, we hear Sounds, we feel Feelings, we sense Impulses, and we make Meanings out of this brilliant kaleidoscopic show that is open 24/7 with no admission price.

Philosophers David Chalmers and Thomas Nagel have both pointed out that our materialist, reductionist worldview breaks down reality into non-sentient parts that can be observed and studied from a third-person perspective, but that Consciousness, our phenomenal experience of sensations, thoughts, inner images, and feelings defies this worldview. That is, how can a system of non-conscious parts, functions, and energies yield the experience of Consciousness? Chalmers named this the Hard Problem of Consciousness.

Philosophers and scientists have attempted to solve the Hard Problem, but they usually do it in ways that miss the problem entirely. They might map the functions of mind, sensation, perception, calculation, language-production using machines and computers, producing the kind of information or results that our minds do. But they cannot simulate the experience of Consciousness, what philosopher Thomas Nagel might say is “what it is like to feel, see, taste, touch, hear, or be something”.

Usually, even the finest of scientists of mind will stop there, having produced amazing and elegant models and simulations of what minds can do that we can observe. What they cannot, as yet, produce is a way to observe a person’s experience just as that person experiences it. And usually, the whole enterprise ends there, and the issue of what Consciousness is gets pushed aside as either unimportant or simply not explainable, (or sometimes dismissed as an illusion, though to whom, and how, the illusion of Consciousness is presented remains unexplained).

The Awareness Stage of the Cycle is, on the deeper level, where we witness, and wonder, at what I think of as The Good Problem of Consciousness. To the Materialists, Consciousness is this pesky thing that’s hard to find on their Materialist map, for the reason I described above. And so, to change the subject to something that the Materialists can say something about and study something about, they shift from the Hard Problem, and, instead, study all the functions of Consciousness in ways that can be measured.

As such, they tend to reduce Consciousness to the measurable inputs and outputs of it, and sneak around the actual experience of the experiential field that is, itself, what we mean when we say Consciousness. Or they say, “Consciousness is obviously an emergent property of brain function”, which explains nothing, but definitely subsumes Consciousness under the much easier-to-study processes of the brain.

This is a comically-criminal way to treat Consciousness, given the fact that our entire lives, our Entire.Lived.Experience, all occurs within the field that we call Consciousness. Nothing that we will ever experience occurs outside of it. As such, it could be considered the most important field of inquiry, not a pesky phenomenon that mainstream science sidelines in its preference for third-person observational method.

This is why I call this “The Good Problem of Consciousness”, because what makes Consciousness so very appealing and fascinating is that it encompasses the very flow and fabric of our lived lives, and is a kind of amazing theatre within which we always have a front-row seat.

Our science minds can’t figure out where that theatre is and who’s watching from the front seat, but Consciousness is right there, as obvious as the nose on your face. It is not this frustrating, unobservable reality, it is immediately, intimately observed in all its fullness within its very “self”. Spira talks about it as a self-aware field of experience, which is about as meta as any good postmodernist could wish for.

When we contemplate, really look into, the spaciousness, infinite flexibility, shape-shifting experience within this good Consciousness, we can feel a kind of wonder, awe, and amazement that is at the root of profound spiritual experience. And that makes for very good living, what Thomas Moore, the Jungian psychotherapist and author calls, "The Re-Enchantment Of Everyday Life.”

When working on Awareness Stage practices, we are able to fully take in the wonder, the mystery, the vividness, and the brilliant magic tricks of Consciousness. Let yourself explore the contents and dynamic dances of our mental, emotional, intuitive, and imaginal with pleasure in the remarkable creativity of its productions.

Meaning-Making and Meaning-Breaking:

“In the vast indifference I invent a meaning. I don’t watch unmoved, I intervene and say that this and this are wrong, and I work to alter them and improve them. The important thing is to pull yourself up by your own hair, to turn yourself inside out and see the whole world with fresh eyes.”

--Marat/Sade, Peter Weiss

“Definitions anchor us in principles. This is not a light point: If we don’t do the basic work of defining the kind of people we want to be in language that is stable and consistent, we can’t work toward stable, consistent goals.” - How to Be An Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi

On the larger collective level, Awareness has the power to break down stuck societal gestalts, concepts, forms, such as old dominance structures, hierarchies, archaic authorities and traditions. As I write this, in Richmond, Virginia, where I live, we have witnessed the tearing down of old statues to the Confederacy, monuments built during Jim Crow to memorialize and concretize (literally!) the institutions of slavery and white supremacy.

For some, this has been a painful tearing away and breaking down of their worshipped, idealized images of Antebellum South, seeing through the imaginary glory to the dark truths of slavery, apartheid, terrorism, and oppression. This is the power of Awareness, of free thought and inspiration, to break down oppressive edifices, and to allow new growth to occur. Thus, you begin to imagine new possibilities of societal progress, to, as Marat says, “pull yourself up by your own hair, to turn yourself inside out and see the whole world with fresh eyes.”

In order to do this hard work of breaking out of stuck societal meanings and gestalts, we have to be willing to run with our own Awarenesses of meaning, rather than sticking with the meanings that are given to us from family, culture, nation, and world. This takes courage and willingness to risk. In Awareness, we are working to allow fresh awareness to conflict with and to replace ideas, meanings, beliefs, rules, and roles that we have swallowed whole, as children from parents, teachers, leaders, peers, and societal norms.

Thus, we have to be brave, on the one hand, to risk discarding meanings given to us for meanings that may make sense only to us. On the other hand, because we live in community, we have to check out privately-derived meanings and awarenesses against those of others in order to have enough overlap, shared meanings and sentiments, to get along well, to collaborate, and to serve one anothers’ best interests. If we veer too far from collective meanings, we risk paranoid isolation and loneliness, or even sociopathic disconnection, but if we veer too far from our own individual lights, we risk numb, dull, unconscious conformity. There is no magic formula for this balance, but the path of Menschitude challenges us to make these determinations freshly, with an eye to valuing both courageous individuality and loving community.