Developing the Shining Light of Self-Awareness In a Dark World

“Throughout human history, as our species has faced the frightening, terrorizing fact that we do not know who we are, or where we are going in this ocean of chaos… To think for yourself you must question authority and learn how to put yourself in a state of vulnerable, open-mindedness; chaotic, confused, vulnerability to inform yourself.” – Timothy Leary

In the modern day, learning how to “develop self-awareness” and “being in touch with your emotions” is in vogue.

It’s “cool” to be “self-aware”. It’s a badge of honor. But is being self-aware for the sake of being self-aware a mechanism for understanding life or another trophy you can put in the cabinet?

In my opinion, self-awareness is the highest crowning achievement of a human being. It’s like a superpower. It elevates you to a godlike status.

In a world full of so much ambiguity and things you should or should not do, self-awareness will help you to discern the “good” from the “bad”.

This is my take on how to develop self awareness and how to increase whatever self-awareness you have.

What is Self-Awareness (Why is it Important to Develop)?

what is self awareness

Here is the main backdrop for this discussion on self-awareness:

The human condition is one that contains varying levels of sensory stimulation wrapped in varying degrees of abstraction.

To filter through the massive amount of external stimulus in our environment, we have created differentiating conventions designed to put life into nice and neat compartmentalized buckets.

Religion. School. Work. Rules. Regulations. Language. Etc. All of this gives rise to the concept known as “civilization”.

Civilization differentiates human beings from animals. Animals indeed have their own civilizations, but it is largely created from instinct rather than some degree of rational thought.

Human civilization has offloaded the general burdens of survival from the individual to the collective group. This, in turn, has created time to create, time to leisure, and most importantly – time to think.

This “thinking about thinking” is known as “metacognition” and it is a key differentiation between animals and humans.

No other animal on the planet can think about its thinking other than the human animal. This gives rise to self-awareness.

Being self-aware on some basic level is a prerequisite to functioning well in civilization. If a person who is not self-aware gets any of the “goodies” that civilization offers, they will very likely lose them in short order.

You see this when people win the lottery or get a huge pile of cash. A couple of years later, that person is broke as fuck and back and square one (or even worse!) because they did not change their paradigm or develop appropriate levels of self-awareness.

Self-awareness defined:

The ability to observe (without judgment) your thoughts, feelings, and emotions in an attempt to place them in an optimal state relative to any given situation.

That’s my definition, at least.

Self-awareness gives rise to three things:

  1. Appropriate levels of action – An individual with high levels of self-awareness will be able to calibrate his or her responses to any given situation. An example would be lowering your speaking voice while in a library or church. An individual without any level of self-awareness cannot do that.
  2. Areas of adjustment – A person can adjust his or her response to their environment by noting the distinct thoughts and feelings in response to that environment. This, in turn, can shape self-development.
  3. Preservation of self and group enhancement – At any given moment, an individual is on a spectrum of pain or pleasure. Self-awareness allows the individual to adjust themselves relative on this spectrum to be a more effective person in their family, community, and the world at large.

What Stops an Individual from Developing Self-Awareness?

As a human being, it is inevitable that you will experience some sort of pain in your day-to-day experience.

This pain does not have to be physical. More often than not, it is not physical. Rather it is the pain of separation.

The pain you experience when you get rejected by your crush. The pain you experience when you lose money. The pain you experience when you don’t get into the college you were hoping and praying to get into. The pain you experience when you feel anxiety. The pain when you experience sheer boredom.

This is basically the separation between you and some sort of pleasurable state of mind.

This is very distressing to deal with, especially without any sort of coping strategies – so your first instinct is to blot it out.

Today, there are many different ways to create a lack of insight and self-awareness. Smoking, snorting, fucking, browsing, watching, whatever distraction the mind can conjure up, it’s out there somewhere.

Whether they be uppers or downers, these various distractions dull awareness because they tone down the level of processing going on in your consciousness.

Someone doesn’t watch TV to become more self-aware. They do it in an attempt to “unplug”.

Even something like psychedelics (which can be a massive tool for developing self-awareness) can ultimately be an impediment to being self-aware because they shift the day-to-day perception of the individual. An “insight” achieved on psychedelics can be like someone taking “an amazing” vacation somewhere but that person remains the same individual at a basic level.

In short, they can be little more than pure escapism.

The form you have selected does not exist.

Mental Delusions that Arise on the Path to Developing Self-Awareness

Springboarding off of the last point – even the pursuit of developing self-awareness itself can be escapism!

Why?

In any type of psychological or spiritual work, there is a very real danger of naval-gazing self-indulgence.

Developing self-awareness for the sake of developing self-awareness is a type of mental masturbation, something that is common in self-help or self-development.

The goal of self-awareness is to see past the illusory nature of civilization and your responses to that illusion. Nothing more, nothing less.

There are legions of people who want to gain “enlightenment” because it will somehow make their life easier. The end result is the same – trying to escape. Trying to scurry away.

Even when you are enlightened, you’ll still have to pay your bills. You’ll still get hungry. You’ll still get sexual cravings. You’ll still be a piece of consciousness locked within this weighty prison called a body.

You just know how to deal with it better. So then we come full circle again – back to self-awareness.

Rationalizations and Ego-Fixations

A second side trap that arises is the emergence of massive mental roadblocks that prevent or even retard progress.

For example: thinking you are already self-aware. You very well may be. But you can’t be aware of everything all the time. There will inevitably be feelings and thoughts outside of your conscious awareness (if there weren’t, you’d go fucking crazy). Thinking you are self-aware already means you have nothing to learn. And if there’s nothing to learn, then there’s no reason to live. The opposite of life is death. Therefore, you are a walking corpse.

Going along with this is the realization that you are a piece of shit. When you do this work to a high degree, you will be aware of all the stupid thoughts, feelings, and biases that you experience on a daily basis. This can lead to self-hatred. Self-hatred can lead to wanting to annihilate the self, aka – suicide. Suicide is the opposite of self-awareness. Therefore, you are still not self-aware.

Do you see where these lead? Do you see how ridiculous this is? Do you see how insane the mind can become?

Developing true self-awareness will result in a significant degree of pain and you will do anything to avoid that, thus the deployment of these traps of the mind.

The only way to transcend these is to develop “an interior perspective”,

Ways to Develop Self Awareness

ways to develop self-awareness

Most of the methods to develop self-awareness will involve some type of interior searching. You’re not going to find self-awareness at the bottom of a bowl of cereal or the end of a joint. Granted, you will experience some sort of reaction to these two stimuli, but at the end of the day – it’s still your reaction. As a result, everything comes back to you.

Here’s some ways to develop that inner citadel and self-awareness activities.

Meditation helps increase self-awareness

Meditation is the gateway to developing self-awareness. Most of the time, your awareness and attention are directed outward. Meditation shifts it inward.

Think of meditation as an inner searching, an inner spotlight highlighting the dark areas of your consciousness. As you meditate, all sorts of thoughts will arise. That’s normal. The longer you can extend this period of inner searching, the better you’ll come out of it.

This is one aspect of mind management.

Then, you have new material and emotional content to work with, which leads to the next method: questioning.

Questioning Helps Increase Self-Awareness

Asking questions expands the mind. Issuing statements close it. This goes back to what I said before: if you already know, you cannot learn.

Always ask yourself why you have a certain reaction to certain stimuli. Ones such as feeling discomfort when you place your hand on a hot stove are obvious but what about other ambiguous ones?

What about feelings of discomfort when you’re around attractive women? Or feelings of intimidation when you’re talking to someone you perceive as higher status than you?

When you start to ask “why”, that opens up the door for other questions. This can lead you down an endless road of questions. Now the key is to dig deep enough to encounter an original source, but not to go down an endless rabbit hole of questions. That just leads you towards that naval-gazing self-indulgence I mentioned earlier.

Asking questions is a key component of shadow work – something that’s a foundation of improving self-awareness.

The Enneagram Helps Increase Self-Awareness

https://soundcloud.com/user-826874715/negative-motivation

Speaking of shadow work, a good tool to understand shadow work is the Enneagram.

The Enneagram is a personality test that’s growing in popularity – and for good reason. The Enneagram is a 9-pointed symbol representing different personality aspects of the human psyche. These 9 traits are manifested in everyone to some degree, but there will be one emotion that will be more “familiar” than others to you. That is your basic personality type.

The system of the Enneagram is simple to understand but is also multilayered, like the humans themselves it is based on. If you want a good resource to sink your teeth into, try The Modern Enneagram for a start.

General Observation Helps Increase Self-Awareness

We live in a world where people are flooded with information on a constant basis, usually in the form of the Internet, a smartphone, or some type of music. We get our sensory fulfillment from these things that our mind automatically tones down the attention we pay on other things, things in our natural world. This over-stimulation makes us less observant to our surroundings.

As an experiment: try going for a week without purposefully using distraction to fill the silence in between the sounds. See what that does to you and your state of being. If you can’t do that without feeling a “twinge” of some kind, then you’ve got other problems.

The Lifelong Journey

Developing self-awareness is a lifelong process. It’s not something you do once and then just “forget it”. It’s like brushing your teeth. It’s something that happens every. single. day. You should also never be disappointed when your efforts to develop self-awareness don’t immediately take root. If you remain vigilant and aware, it will become something that’s just “part of what you do”. Use the tactics here and see how they work out for you.

And if you want a deeper dive into developing self-awareness, check out the course Cornerstone. Psychology is a main module in the course and it’s chock full of strategies, tactics, and mindsets I haven’t shared here.

If you want more information on it, hit the jump below.

One Response to “Developing the Shining Light of Self-Awareness In a Dark World

  • Humankind is the conscience that gives purpose to the world around us. “Upon a time humans had the godhead in themselves, but we behaved so badly that the gods decided to take it away from us.” In this, will arise a godlike type conscience, but only to find purposefulness during a course of trial, battling sub-conscience attempts to regain that godlike conscience mind. That thought arose from reading this article. I took the quote from a documentary called Planetary which was said by the first female “elder”. I forget her name.

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