Awareness is mindfulness interlaced with insight and understanding. Mindfulness casts you as the observer of the present moment, like watching a movie and trying to absorb everything fully. You’re appreciating the acting, the soundtrack, the colors, the writing, the wardrobes, and the overall sensation. Awareness is like playing a video game. You’re still trying to fully absorb everything like with the movie, but you’re also an active part of how things are playing out. There are things you can change by deciding your inputs during the process. Thus you’re observing how your inputs and the inputs of others are affecting reality. You’re still very much in, and mindful of, the present moment. The difference is the added layer of connecting the dots between events and actions.
By being mindful we’ve taken in all the data, the actual reality of the present moment and avoided warping that with our minds. So how can we then use our minds to understand it and derive insights without warping it? We practice. We practice mindfulness and we also practice meditation. In those two practices, we start to find insights into how our minds work, and eventually into how the minds of others work. When we started being the observer we realized there were more than just the thoughts we thought we were thinking. There were thoughts we ignored, intentionally and unintentionally. The brain fires off every possible idea and reason it can, it’s our job to pick the thought in this multiple choice web that we believe is “right”.
Now it’s time to practice how we select the right answers from the mess in our minds. We should make a habit of verifying whether our thoughts and ideas work in the reality we’re observing, and root out trains of thought that are fueled by ego. If we believe the person we don’t like is being a jerk, is it because they truly are, or is it because we just don’t like them and it’s easier to not like a jerk? The first insights and understandings have to be inward, about ourselves. We must be honest, brutally so, with ourselves to have true understanding about who we are and why we are.
Without understanding yourself you can’t possibly hope to understand others. It’s much easier to practice awareness on ourselves as we have immediate, hopefully very honest, feedback. Once we’re skilled at understanding ourselves, it will be easier to understand others. Most humans, paradoxically, are quite unique and extremely similar at the same time. We’re all fueled by egocentric thinking. It makes sense, we’re at the center of our thoughts, as our thoughts emanate from us. So we view the world from the perspective of what it does to us and what it will do for us. When we have a grasp on our own ego in the sense that we see through it, it will always be there feeding us thoughts to help it thrive, then we will know the ego of someone else.
The ego makes most people think in narrow terms. They think things happen based on what those things mean to their existence, ignoring the existence of everyone else and everything else. Narrow thinkers go out to eat and get upset at their server, whom they view as being curt and rushing them. They assume the server dislikes them for some reason or is bad at their job. These assumptions all flow from the narrow minded egotistical portion of their mind. Their first assumptions are about themselves, that they are disliked, and about how to blame someone else for something they dislike, the server being bad at their job.
With awareness your thinking widens just as with your view of the present moment. You receive the same service, and even get the same suggestions of why from the ego, but you don’t accept those suggestions blindly. You use your widened view and you notice the server has far more tables than any other employee and are rushing around often times with items for multiple tables while trying to field questions at each table they pass on their way. You assume they’ve been given the extra tables to cover a missing shift and are overwhelmed. With your wide thinking you’ve decided to try and be extra nice and lax about your service to not add to the stress the server feels. This makes you feel good and helps relieve some tension in the server’s day and contributes to making the world a better place for everyone. Awareness improves your experience of life, and helps add a little boost to those you come into contact with.
Having awareness will give you the ability to better understand the flow of reality. You’ll notice life’s patterns, the relativity of everything, and be able to better visualize larger sets of cause and effect. Your brain’s prediction engine will far outperform the average persons, as you are actually paying attention to reality while they’re off in la la land thinking of things only in relation to how they affect themselves.
By improving your predictions, you improve your quality of life. As you learn how everything and everybody works, things just start to fall into place for you, you feel less resistance in life. You see how to get to where you want to be by swimming with the current rather than fighting against it en-route to your destination.
Awareness can be a tool to slow time around you as well. Being mindful already helps us have a better experience of time. When adding awareness to the mix, we’re able to see things before they happen. Our cause and effect chain can reach far back in time, and stretch well into the future, to give us a better picture than the average person of how things are going to go. This makes us appear to be in turbo mode compared to onlookers as we always understand how to be in the right place at the right time, and how to head off possible disasters.
Most of all it helps us retain a calm and cool mindset which is required to slow time down. Panicked and stressed people lose time as they’re thinking and doing too many things at once. Doing things poorly, and poorly thinking about things no less. Their results are as chaotic as they are. The calm, cool, and aware person has an abundance of time that reflects their attention to detail and their foresight.
To practice awareness, you must practice mindfulness and meditation. Then be mindful of the thoughts you are selecting, are they fueled by ego? Or are they fueled by reality? After focusing on mindfulness and meditating daily, you will start to develop awareness whether you’re actively trying or not. Awareness will improve your results in all aspects of life and help to alleviate a lot of unnecessary stresses that were formed through egocentric narrow thinking. You’ll end up with a better understanding of the ones you love, and even the ones you don’t like. This will mean you get along with more people and find collaboration easier. Awareness can’t solve all your problems, but it sure makes it easier to be a problem solver.
