What is Self Awareness?

 

The path to Enlightenment begins with self awareness. A self aware person is one who is capable of impartially observing his or her own thoughts on a continuous non-judgemental basis and take corrective actions as may be required. The key phrase here is continual basis, not just once in a while when you happen to remember.

You are already capable of watching your thoughts, but have been mostly conditioned to allow them to free flow without autonomy. Much like being unable to see the trees for the forest, it is the incessant activity of the mind that prevents you from seeing thoughts for what they really are; mostly useless, repetitive and harmful to the psyche.

The thoughts being referred to here are "heard" in the mind in ones preferred spoken language. When you speak those words in your mind, you are aware of what the words are. In other words you "hear" them. For visual thinkers, this awareness is when thoughts are "seen" or "viewed" in the theatre of the mind.

Any conversation requires both a speaker and a listener. Likewise a theatre needs both a projector and an audience. You can think of the mind as having both "entities" present. An enlightened person has learned to shift their consciousness from the position of being the speaker. For visual thinkers, this is a shift from being the projector to being the audience. This is a process best learned in meditation.

The more you become aware of your thoughts, the greater the understanding of the harmful effects they produce and the negative impact this has on your psyche. Your thoughts, which dictate your actions, have an effect on others around you as well as both directly and indirectly impacting the rest of the world. Allowing your thoughts to run free and unsupervised is about as wise as allowing a small child to play near a busy construction site unsupervised.

It is through this realization combined with the fact that your mind wants you to be happy that your mind can become a willing participant in the cessation of unnecessary discursive thought. In other words, when your mind realizes that it is causing you and others suffering, it finds itself in conflict with the need for happiness, and thus relinquishes its role as the producer of an estimated 60,000 to 80,000 thoughts per day that the average person has.
This is where one encounters the silence of the mind. Silence of the mind is the source of true intelligence, genius and inspiration. Some of the worlds greatest minds, like Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla were very aware of this. From the silence of the mind flows all of the most wonderful qualities of the universe, such as unconditional love, compassion, joy, peace, tranquillity, equanimity, acceptance, and an all pervasive sense of knowing and belonging.

The more time spent in this silence, the better one becomes at watching their thoughts when they do arise. Those thoughts, when they do appear, seem to take on a much softer, quieter tone to them, which in turn makes them easier to let go of, without having to "jump on the bandwagon" and follow them wherever they lead you.

The better you become at watching your thoughts, the more enlightened you become. Enlightenment is not so much a state you enter, as it is a journey. The further you travel along the path, the deeper the state you will find yourself in.

The most important thing to remember is to never judge your thoughts. They are what they are. Because the mind operates in feedback loops, judgement only feeds the loops and will eventually create a new thought loop. It is for this reason that all paths of either enlightenment or religion or self improvement stress the importance of non-judgement.

Simply observe the thoughts and take corrective action, such as letting go of the thought, not acting on impulse, and choosing not to follow it just to see where it leads. The better you become at this process, the more enlightened you become.

Michael L. Fournier