Awareness.

“The ability to perceive”

A powerful topic, these terms tend to go around the block:

• The All Mighty “Self Awareness“
• “Higher Awareness” (and said bragging rights upon achieve such a state.. right?)
• “Enlightened Awareness“

Time to expand our awareness on what these terms mean!

From my personal experience, awareness is the conscious viewing in the theatre of life, the theatre of experience! Whenever you take in the performance through the senses and your aware of it (I’m watching a movie right now, I’m kissing my girlfriend, I’m feeling my chest breathing etc), you achieve a level of awareness.  Making the effort to notice yourself in this play of life makes the experience much more total and deep. Is it then just an external spotlight of the mind’s eye?  Nope!

We also have ability to focus our spotlight of awareness within ourselves.  Physical sensations – sure.  Even more so, we can bring our mind’s eye to the thoughts and feelings of the mind itself!  This does an amazing couple of things.  One, it allows us to be more responsible for how we think and consequently feel (this also has a big effect in our physical circumstance too).

In my spiritual journey, amazing moments occur when I realize something new thus bringing awareness to it – a habitual pattern, a rusty belief, or even self-talk!  I presonally believe a reason why people with such checkered backgrounds seem happier is due to these moments, these “quantum shifts”!

Then of course, there’s awareness of the soul.  Writing about this is like educating fish about water.  All I can say about awareness in this regard is to be open and appricate the little things.  Every experience can teach us something, no matter how wonderful or detrimental!   Remember, experience fuels our preference, lengthening our plumb line adding to our scale of right-and-wrong and good-and-bad!  This act some believe, actually evolves our soul, satisfying the cosmic role of our presence??

Speculation aside,  a great image for this lesson would be that of a staircase.  With every new experience (physical) or piece of information (metaphysical) we can slow down and take notice.  Observe life!  With every newly gained awareness we expand the soul, floating to the next level looking at things pass.  Yes it is almost hierarchy, in which life was a linear process of one event, one feeling, one thought after another.  But now we have the ability to make such feelings, thoughts and experiences as children of the mind from our parent perspective.

For starters, being aware our personal priorities can push our spiritual journey along tremendously!  I leave you with a great quote from Thoreau to kick start ya:

“Most men (or women) are engaged in business the greater part of their lives, because the soul abhors a vacuum, and they have not discovered any continuous employment for man’s noblest faculties.”