The chances of our body unknowingly colliding with those of others or against walls and other objects increase when a sudden power failure leaves us groping in darkness.
Conscious awareness is like the light. When we lack it, we increase our chances of creating more suffering for ourselves and others. Most problems we are reeling under, as a civilisation, too, are not technological or financial. They are ‘awareness’ problems. This is so because happiness is the goal of all our goals, and we need awareness not only to create happiness but also to feel it.
In fact, the Hebrew root for the word sin means ‘missing the aim’ or ‘not being consciously present’. Indeed, unconscious living is the original sin from which all suffering results.
We can dispel the darkness of unconscious living by practicing the following three components of conscious awareness, every day:
1. Ability to understand the need of the moment: Every moment offers us with a need to respond to. When we bring all of ourselves to observe, understand and respond to it, we grow in awareness.
Have you seen how a sculptor steps back, every now and then, to have an overview of the work in progress?
He keeps doing this repeatedly to check what he needs to do next to make it look like the one in his mind. For him, finding and closing these gaps is the need of the moment.
We understand the precise need of any given moment when we step back from the situation to present ourselves with the unbiased bigger picture that surrounds it. Doing so enables us to understand how various aspects of a challenge are placed in relation to each other and to the whole. Untying a knot becomes easier, once we understand how it is tied.
2. A win-win-win attitude: A win-win-win outcome is one that optimally fulfils the authentic needs of the self, the other person and the society. A win-win-win attitude is the propensity and ability to test and fine tune our responses before executing them to help us move towards a win-win-win outcome.
The water that becomes the wave does not cease to be the ocean. Similarly, by becoming an individual, we don’t cease to be the society. The needs of our wave-self and ocean-self continue to be interdependent.
Once, while living in an ashram, I had the first-hand experience of this interdependence. As per the ashram rules, we were to wash, clean and wipe dry our plates after eating every meal. So, the plates that we would pick up from the shelf to serve ourselves with the food and eat from were already washed and wiped clean by someone else.
On the very first day, when I finished my dinner and went to wash my plate under the tap water, I found the water freezing cold. I felt as if a stream of acid was piercing through my hands. I heard myself thinking, “This is not the time to practice ethics. Irrespective of anything, I am not going to subject myself to this torture.” I looked at the person standing next to me, and I felt as if he was washing the very plate I would be eating from, the next day.
For a moment, I felt myself in his body along with all my thoughts and hated him for his callousness. Realising this inescapable interdependence, I looked over my shoulder, smiled at him and said, “Even if it hurts, we must do it with perfection.” When he turned his head to return my smile, I felt the compulsion of being an example of what I just said. I began to expose my hands to that water fearlessly—cleaning it to perfection, overcoming all my resistance to the physical discomfort. When I noticed that he, too, was doing it the same way, despite all the discomfort, tears began to well up in my eyes, and I felt like giving him a tight hug.
Remember, whatever and whenever we give, we give to no one else but to ourselves.
3. Farsightedness: It is the willingness to undergo pain in the present moment for the sake of our future comfort. The more we practice this farsightedness in our responses, the more we grow in our awareness.
Depending on our attitude towards pain and comfort, our response in any given moment could stem from any of the following two combinations:
A. Instant comfort-distant pain
B. Instant pain-distant comfort
In the ashram, as my awareness expanded from the wave consciousness to the oceanic consciousness, I saw my myopic ‘A’ kind of response transforming into a farsighted ‘B’ kind, on its own.
With practice, we begin to excel, in any field. Developing a habit to understand the need of the moment and to respond to it with farsightedness and a win-win-win attitude will gradually deepen conscious awareness in our lives.
Then, like the arrows shot by a champion archer, our responses will hit their targets every time—inspiring others to do the same. This is the forgotten heroic mission, we are here for. The author is a corporate trainer, keynote speaker and the writer of Reverse Your Thoughts, Reverse Your Diseases and several other books. thrive.ab@gmail.com