21. Gratitude for awareness

“Let us not look back in anger or forward in fear, but around in awareness” 
~James Thurber ~

I have been engaging with life, in all its daily bump and grind and in the process I have been taking for granted all that is around me. There is beauty, wonder, love and life surrounding me each and every day, but I miss it without awareness. Being in the now, the gift of being in the moment soon passes and no longer is - some say it becomes a memory, but that could be a whole other discussion.

As a result, when I became conscious of this, I started exercising “awareness”. Awareness of my world and all the things/happenings in it. To paraphrase the Webster’s Dictionary definition, awareness implies a level of vigilance (alertness) in observation or experience in drawing conclusions from what is observed.

Wikipedia states: “Awareness is the state or ability to perceive, to feel, or to be conscious of events, objects or sensory patterns. In this level of consciousness, sense data can be confirmed by an observer without necessarily implying understanding. More broadly, it is the state or quality of being aware of something. In biological psychology, awareness is defined as a human's or an animal's perception and cognitive reaction to a condition or event.”

Awareness in a personal development sense is a consciousness of who you are being and the impact that you have on others and yourself. Try this… imagine your guardian angel on your shoulder – watching what you think, say and do and then whispers what she observes in your ear = heightened awareness is what you should experience.

Self-awareness is the “turning inward” aspect of the self. It’s been suggested by cognitive scientists that this mechanism evolved primarily in a social context  so that people could predict behaviour by creating a similar model for behaviours i.e. I feel love so I know what love feels like for someone else. (Anyone agree that it sounds very similar to the belief that Source sent parts of itself to have a human experience?) It stands to reason then that after figuring out how to deal with other people we (humans) then used the same model just personalised it. Well that’s what the scientists say anyway, among words like neurons, cingulate, continuity, mirror neurons, testable predictions and other “biltong (South African for jerky - only dry if you’re not a scientist)” stuff. Oh, one more thing about this – as always monkeys were involved and neurons were dubbed “monkey-see-monkey-do” neuronsJ. Ahh, us humans, you gotta love us. All of this for nuts! LOL.

Jokes aside though – for me the wow factor of this research is the discovery of “empathy neurons”. Researchers at the University of Toronto found that some neurons fire equally strongly when a patient watched someone else being poked with a needle. They say that the empathy neuron dissolves the barrier between self and others – the neuron doesn’t know the difference between itself and others. What a strong argument supporting connectedness and an even stronger argument saying… become aware of yourself and the world around you!

Heart Thoughts:

• The mirror neuron mechanism that originally evolved to help you adopt another's point of view was turned inward to look at your own self – you looked out before looking in – so how do you feel now that you know our neurons do connect us?
• When we use phrases like "self conscious" do we really mean that we are conscious of others being conscious of us? How do we know whether this is true or not?
• Mirror neurons are a lot more complex than we represent here, we have not even scratched the surface of the surface. However, considering that everyone has been working at this for oh, roughly three thousand years – I think it’s safe to say that we still don’t know how it works and it has been identified as crucial for our survival – here is the rub… are you practicing awareness?

Heart Note:Journal about your state of awareness, use the set point system to focus yourself and enjoy your discoveries.

PS (Parting Shot if you haven’t already figured): try not to be too enamored with the “monkey-see-monkey-do” neurons – they aren’t enough, I have yet to meet a real self-aware monkey!

In Gratitude
Mish