The Ultimate Test of Your Awareness

To be aware is to perceive clearly and respond accurately, said Anthony De Mello. That’s also the prerequisite of love.

If you don’t even see the person in front of you, how can you say you love her? You’re in love with your false and prejudiced image of her. When you react harshly to her, something in you is foul, not in her. Your blurred perception leads to an inaccurate response.

You’re stuck, however, with unclarity and inaccuracy! You can never completely transcend it. You can’t be purely aware. Reactions and interpretations are preprogrammed and socialized into you. You can’t silence them and be clearly aware of an external object or event, of your internal state or, as in most cases, of a complex combination of both.

So what to do?

Stupid lemons!

Imagine you pick a small pear from a bowl, bite into it without looking, and only then realize it was actually a lemon. Depending on your mental fervor, you’re likely to go through a chain reaction, involving (some or all of) the following:

You put on a grimace, give the lemon a piercing look, maybe even throw it to the ground.

“Yuck! Horrible! What in the world have I been thinking about!” you say out loud.

“Gosh, why am I so hard on myself?” you calm yourself down.

“It’s mom again! She’s put lemons on top of pears. Again!” you try to rationalize, identify the culprit.

You go on emotionally: “Ah, how I hate lemons! I don’t even want to eat a pear anymore!”

You stand up, go to the sink to wash out the lemon taste from your mouth. You take the lemons away and hide them, leaving only pears in the bowl — to teach mom a lesson.

Hours later when she comes home you observe her secretly while she’s walking around the kitchen table. She doesn’t seem to notice the lemons are missing. That upsets you! And when she picks a pear, bites into it and starts to chat with you about the day, you’re on the verge of exploding.

She surely knows, she’s irritating you on purpose!

Finally, you lash out, accusing her of spoiling your day with bloody lemons. She knew you hated them. Why does she always have to do this to you?

And on and on you go…

When you stop to take a breath, she tells you that aunt Lilly came on a visit last night and she brought some fruits. It was probably her that put the lemons on top of pears.

Her explanation makes you want to run to aunt Lilly right away and vent out your anger at her.

You may go as far as cursing God for creating lemons or to sinking in self-condmnation for being unable to break the spell of making mistakes again and again.

Be like a floodlight

Are you aware of subtle and gross reactions to what you’ve just read? Can you at least see them in retrospect? Have you observed your internal agreements and disagreements, your feelings and your emotions? Has your mouth salivated when you imagined biting into a lemon? Have you noticed the word “condemnation” in the last paragraph misses an “e”? What’s your reaction to my mention of it?

I could continue endlessly with such questions, pointing out the impossibility of total awareness. My aim is not to denigrate your attempts to be more aware, nor to arouse frustration because the bar is (always) set too high. My intention is to invite you to relax within objective limitations and stretch the subjective ones gently, with love.

Forcing yourself to be present, eliminating distractions one by one is counterproductive and ultimately frustrating. Developing self-awareness is not so much about control, tension, and focus. It doesn’t require stopping the process of reaction, but rather encompassing it broadly and relaxing into it; widening the awareness instead of narrowing it.

Many spiritual teachers have said this: awareness is not a flashlight, it’s a floodlight.

The flashlight means focused attention. You end up being stuck with the lemon, while your body and mind frantically rush around without you noticing it.

The floodlight is an all-encompassing presence. You don’t obstruct the chain of reactions to what you perceived. You add awareness of your reaction to the awareness of the perception. And if there are further reactions and events, you keep adding them and removing yourself a step further each time. You can even register when you identified with perception and reaction and when you didn’t.

That’s the hardest part because you’re programmed to identify. Once your identifications are shaped, it’s extremely unpleasant to scrutinize them. Your instinct is to defend them, not to challenge them.

To become aware of your identifications, try alternating between defending and challenging them and observe what’s going on inside you. Break a holy habit once, stick to it more rigidly than ever the next time. Take another step back. When you notice being drawn to details and lost in reactions, observe yourself. And if you condemn yourself for being lost, observe that too. Notice the quality of your observing: is it soft and curious, or hard and judgmental? Observe that too.

There’s a limit to how many steps back you can make and how much you can encompass with your floodlight awareness, without creating a mental conundrum. Relax in your limits and be happy when you make progress. If trust and wonder come naturally to you, fear and prejudice won’t be in the way and you’ll be able to relax even in very stressful situations.

Back to transcending self-referentiality

In my previous article, I announced I’ll write about three key competencies of being spiritual. In my world, being spiritual means transcending self-referentiality. This article takes the explanation a step further. Chapters will be building on each other, so if you haven’t read the first, I’d encourage you to read it and continue with the next one.

Thus far I elaborated on the first competence: self-awareness. You can train it like a muscle to develop flexible broad floodlight qualities.

Self-awareness is an extraordinary human gift. It opens you to the curiosity which fosters all inquiry and thus all knowledge. The potential of self-awareness is so immense that society fears it. It would be easiest to completely relax into it; this would save us all the hard work currently invested in building and maintaining walls to keep us from being aware of the truth.

Allowing awareness, we’d have to face a terrible pain. A truth hurts since key concepts of personal identity are built on false premises and the longer it goes on the more difficult it is to break out of it. This is true in every single culture on the planet.

You can estimate the stage of development of self-awareness of an individual or a society by the kind of atmosphere around them: tense, stressful, nervous, or relaxed, light, humorous. Go to a spiritual event, a mass or ceremony and observe: are people pent-up or unbuttoned. Are behaviors rigidly measured and misdemeanor harshly judged and even punished?

Have you ever felt at ceremonies like a lemon among pears? Have others ever “bitten into you” and realized you’re not what you seemed to be and burst out against you? Have you bitten into lemons yourself? Have you been pent-up and bitter — even years later — disapproving of their mistakes unable to get over them?

You were (and still are) caught up in your own referential field. That’s unavoidable. Just don’t be proud of it and don’t block your own unfolding.

Self-awareness means seeing that you see, perceiving that you perceive, knowing that you know. And you don’t attach any value, any qualifier to it — neither good nor bad. On the height of self-awareness, you’re able, as an internal observer, to follow your own actions as if they are being performed by someone else.

Self-reflection and self-correction

Only with self-reflection (the second competency), values and qualifiers emerge. Here “qualifiers” are your means of evaluating what’s useful, good, right in a particular situation, and what’s harmful, bad, wrong. Like in the case of self-awareness, you may make many steps back by qualifying the qualifiers of qualifiers…

Let’s say a crowd reacts against a “misdemeanor” of an individual. They yell out negative qualifiers. You take a step back and see the injustice of it because people in the crowd don’t know the full story. You qualify the behavior as unfair. Then you look at your own judgment of them and notice you’re favoring the individual because of your own background. A lemon favoring another lemon amongst pears…

Your value system is based on socialization. In your childhood, your parents introduced you to some values as positive. Later in life, you may have recognized them as negative; and you’ve exposed many negative values as exaggerated. Such recognition is the driver of all personal and social change.

The process of being aware and self-reflecting is different in each individual. Each of you reads this text in your own way and interprets it uniquely. In each of you, the impetus for change awakens differently.

By the way: In large enough groups, the impetus to change is very diffused. It is no coincidence that, in such a diffused social field, the most organic social organization is exactly what we have today: representative democracy. This facilitates decision-making by reducing complexity to two poles and a few parties.

Self-reflection allows you to see all this and be fine with it. The paradox of the pinnacle of self-reflection and all the decisions that go along with such self-reflection is a reconciliation with everything there is — both “good” and “bad”. You’re aware that no decision brings only good to everyone; every choice is can make someone inconvenienced.

“Mistakes” are portals of discovery. Closing yourself in cramps because you’re making mistakes will only lead to mental and even physical disease. Self-awareness lets you see this on diverse levels. Self-reflection lets you place qualifiers wisely relative to each person, each situation, and in many layers.

Such an attitude to the unfolding of fate, to the dance of coincidences and conscious decisions, enables healthy self-correction (the third competency). Such self-correction emerges from benevolence, not from indignation, fear, disgust, hatred. Ultimately, you are able to stand with courage and strength for the good, and allow the hurtful to fade away without violence.

The apparent contradiction of the pinnacle of self-correction is that you can be fully in two roles at once: in the role of a completely unaffected observer and in the role of a proactive agent of change.

(You can read more about self-correction in my next article.)

I’d like to wrap up the themes I’ve opened up thus far…

Spirituality is transcending self-referentiality. The three competencies for transcending self-referentiality are:

1. self-awareness
2. self-reflection
3. self-correction

These three competencies enable breadth and depth of presence — clarity of perception and accuracy of response. In practice, they are associated with: commitment without attachment, balance between reason and emotions, stable convictions and steadfast doubt.

Awareness is the light allowing you to perceive what’s happening — in you and around you. Then you reflect on what you’ve perceived, judge what seems positive and what doesn’t. Self-reflection is based on the value scales you adopt through socialization and as you scrutinize those, you qualify them. You can even qualify your manner of self-reflection etc.

As you embark on the path of self-change or self-correction, make sure you’re coming from love, not from resentment and hatred.

Those extraordinary people with broader self-awareness and deeper self-reflection end up changing their lives and teasing society to change too. The society pushes them off to the periphery: change is hard, especially a virtous change; we like it only in theory, not in practice. Only when we realize (self-awareness) how much hardship and suffering it saves us in the long run (self-reflection) are we ready to embrace it (self-correction).

People with such competences or at least openness to developing them can co-create foundations of a sane society.