According to an ancient Indian fable, a mouse was in constant distress because of its fear of the cat.
A magician took pity on it and turned it into a cat.
But then it became afraid of the dog. So the magician turned it into a dog.
Then it began to fear the panther. So the magician turned it into a panther.
Whereupon it was full of fear for the hunter.
At this point the magician gave up, and turned it into a mouse again saying, “Nothing I do for you is going to be of any help because you have the heart of a mouse.”
Self-Awareness
We are afraid to take the challenge to work on ourselves. For us if someone takes our responsibility then we are happy. In the process two things we loss is dignity and bliss. We have become baggers. God gave us the opportunity to be emperor and we choose to be bagger.
Who is responsible for our misery? No one but we ourselves.
We need to take action in objective world but the action needs to come from our subjectivity. Why we have so much of fear of working on ourselves. As we cannot get any approval when we act from our subjectivity. We are always dependent on approvals. We find that when we act from our subjectivity we are alone there. No one is available there. In a way it looks very appealing. But in reality it is not true.
Let me explain to you differently – is air tangible? No. Right, still we feel the air or not? Same way as we are not familiar with our empty space – subjectivity – we are not counting that as presence. But in that empty space whole, universe, is present. It is only in our silence we can recognise it. Once you recognize your empty space which is your own godliness, own light, all your fear will drop out.
It is beautiful, it is endless, it is full and yet seems empty. It hurts us.
If we become Self-aware then we can become familiar with our empty space.
People need to know that they have all the tools within themselves. Self-awareness, which means awareness of the body, awareness of their mental space, awareness of their relationships – not only with each other, but with life and the ecosystem.
By becoming self-aware, you gain ownership of reality; in becoming real, you become the master of both inner and outer life.
Choice is the key, because human beings are the only creatures who can choose to evolve, who can shape their destiny. Furthermore, we have been given the gift of “self-awareness,” which allows us to step back into our true selves to observe and use our brains to create the world we wish to live in.
Learning from story Fear: Self-Awareness
Experience Learning
Levels of Awareness:
Self- awareness isn’t the same as praying, believing in miracles, or seeking God’s favor.
The level that religious believers know as the soul or spirit. When you base your life on the reality of the soul, you hold spiritual beliefs. When you go further and take the level of the soul to be the basis of life – the very ground of existence – then spirituality becomes an active principle. The soul is awakened. In reality the soul never sleeps, because pure awareness infuses every thought, feeling, and action. We may disguise this fact from ourselves. One symptom of contracted awareness, in fact, is a complete denial of “higher” reality. This denial is based not on willful blindness but on the absence of experience. A mind blocked by fear, anxiety, anger, resentment, or suffering of any kind isn’t able to experience expanded awareness, much less pure awareness.
If the mind worked like a machine, it wouldn’t be able to recover from the state of suffering. Like gears worn down by friction, our thoughts would get worse and worse until the day arrived when suffering was completely victorious.
For countless people life feels just like that. But the potential to heal is never worn away completely; change and transformation are your birthright, guaranteed not by God, faith, or salvation, but by the indestructible basis of life, which is pure awareness. To be alive is to be caught up in constant change. When we feel stuck, our cells are still processing the basic materials of life continually.
Feelings of numbness and depression can make life seem to stop. So can sudden loss and failure. Yet no matter how severe the shock or how stubborn the obstacle, the ground state of existence isn’t affected, much less damaged.
The truth is that each of us is entangled in the world we call real. Mind isn’t a ghost. It is embedded in the whole situation you find yourself in. To see how that works, first abolish the separation between a thought, the brain cells the thought stimulates, the body’s reaction as it receives messages from the brain, and the activity you decide to pursue. All are part of the same continuous process. Even among geneticists, who for decades preached that genes determined almost every aspect of life, there is a new catchphrase: genes are not nouns, they are verbs. Dynamism is universal.
Spirituality has always begun with wholeness. Lost in a world of specifics, we forget that isolation is a myth. Your life at this moment is an entangled process that involves thoughts, feelings, brain chemicals, the body’s responses, information, social interactions, relationships, and the ecology. So when you speak and act, you are causing a ripple that is felt in the flow of life. Yet spirituality goes beyond describing you; it also prescribes the most beneficial way to affect the flow of life.
Tags: Self-Awareness
