Awareness

Over the course of the last 33 days, I have been creating 1-minute videos across social media in celebration of life; a celebration of the whole. In my quest to explore the beautifully simplistic forms of existence, I now come to explore the idea of awareness. After all, celebration of the whole involves celebrating existence in all its forms, so let us explore and celebrate awareness. Let us look at how it has multiple forms in our being.

1. Mindfulness

The world is full of minds, but are these minds full of awareness? Mindfulness is the practice of acknowledging everything that we receive through our senses. Essentially, we are all transistor radios with antennas that can tune into a multitude of frequencies. But most of us will find the frequency that brings us the highest form of personal comfort, and then forget that there is a vast array of other frequencies from which we can attain reception. You won’t fine-tune your radio without turning the nozzle, and along this vein, you will not be completely aware of reality in its entirety without taking the time to tune into your senses. Taking the time to really tune into each and every sense that we have can really enhance your mental picture of life — and in turn — create a sense of clarity (awareness). With radios, we tend to log certain frequency numbers in our minds so that we can tune in right away without losing the time getting lost in the white noise. With ourselves though, a great mechanism by which we can become better at tuning into different mental frequencies at will is known as meditation. Meditation enables us to practice mental mastery by practicing mindfulness with simple techniques such as conscious breathing or labelling our immediate surroundings and any sounds we are receiving. You better start turning your mental nozzle and checking out all those neural frequencies!

2. Alpha-Brainwaves

One of the more prominent neural oscillations that occur during meditation or any state of mental clarity and awareness, is the alpha wave. Alpha waves are neural oscillations in the frequency range of 8–12 Hz that arise from the coherent and synchronous electrical activity of human thalamic pacemaker cells. They primarily emerge from the occipital lobe — which is the visual processing centre of the mammalian brain — during wakeful relaxation with closed eyes. Alpha waves are reduced with open eyes, drowsiness and sleep. Essentially, if you have ever meditated or even practiced lucid dreaming, you have tuned into this frequency, and therefore have entered a state of awareness that most people have forgotten exists. When someone is singing, dancing, making love, breathing, or creating something in a state of flow with their eyes closed, you can be sure that they are tuning into that 8–12Hz frequency filled with the awareness contained in the alpha waves. In Greek, Alpha is the first letter in the alphabet and signified beginnings in the ancient Greek texts. All existence begins with awareness, so use the alpha waves to begin your journey of awakening to the vibrant beauty of this wondrous existence.

3. Look Around

Head for nature. Be quiet. Breathe. Look at the beauty. If you do it right, you will see things you never saw before. You will notice what was once unnoticeable. You will discover something new; maybe a new you. Perceptual discoveries in the external can lead to conceptual profundity. This may lead to an internal awakening in the feeling of wonder, a feeling from which we tend to wander. We wander and meander through life letting such beautiful details fly by without taking the time to look. Life goes quickly when you are not aware, so increasing your awareness by making and taking time to look may just increase your time on this planet — or at least how long it felt. Personally, I remember how hyper-aware I was in certain psychedelic trips. This hyper-awareness always caused me to perceive condensed periods of time in an expansive fashion. I had more time and mental clarity to see things I would not usually see. This led me to consider that I could be things I could not usually be, like being one with a tree. Albeit, this is not some suggestion for you to use psychedelics as a means for heightening your awareness (although they can do that if used right), but rather a reminder for you to just shut up and use your gift of sight to look at the heavenly grounds bestowed upon us here on Earth. Look around.

4. Look Within

Looking within sounds so cliche at this point, but it is still an objective truth of subjective inspection into one’s internal nature. It is fair to inspect the nature of society’s structures and figure out ways to conquer the system so that you may attain financial freedom, but until you unleash the freedom locked within yourself which has no need for material assets, then and only then will you be truly free. The conceptual exchange of value within this imagined reality of business and financial games is but a mere dopamine-driven illusion that takes us away from what lies within. Albeit, if one has already unlocked this freedom, this game of monopoly can be a tool for love and prosperity. Looking within creates more understanding through the awareness of what lies beneath. Awareness and understanding are pillars of freedom. Once you are aware of your true capacity as a human being, your understanding for life spawns a freedom in your choice of perception at any given time — you go up a level in the game of life.

5. Listen

Inhale. Exhale. I always find that I am a better listener after taking deep breaths, especially with my eyes closed. I suppose it’s like hoovering your mind of all the dusty ideas that clog the neural network’s capacity to hear beyond the bubble of thought. Listening is one of the (if not most) important skills in personal development. It is vitally important for interpersonal awareness, as well as an interspersed understanding of the broad spectrum of sound across the world. You might be having a bad day, but if you just take a deep breath and listen, you might hear a bird chirping and who knows, you might even realise that it’s not that bad of a day because you are still lucky to be alive! We are all passively and unconsciously listening, therefore we are not exactly hearing. Conscious listening creates acute skills in hearing. It enables you to hear things you would not normally hear, and sometimes things that can be quite far away. Again — as I always reiterate — this is a gift. And in the celebration of life, it is imperative that you do not waste any of your gifted senses. The more you tune into your senses, the sweeter life becomes.

6. Feel

We are living in a world that seems to be stuck in the eyes. A world that cares more about how things look rather than how they feel, or even sound. Remember, how things appear and sound cause us to feel a certain way, but when society makes appearance the primary tool for gratification, then we have lost balance. We all have intuitive senses locked away inside of us. We have lost touch with that because we are a society that has become obsessed with the motto “seeing is believing.” Seeing is believing, but believing is also seeing. Without truly feeling belief, you will always doubt what you are seeing either way. Let us take our bodies for example: many people are working out and that is great, but many people’s reasons for working out tend to relate to a level of physical insecurity — I was one of them. People are packing on the muscle. Women are trying increase the size of their buttocks and men are trying to attain bigger arms, legs, chest and whatever else, so they are more desirable. The world has become infatuated with appearance so much so that they have lost touch with the human gift of feeling. The world is caught in a loop of visual fantasy. As long as there is visual fantasy, it is harder to attain authentic feelings. It actually becomes more about us feeding our visual cortex with pretty things, rather than actually connecting on a deeper level; love. Try this exercise on for size:

1. Meet with someone close to you.
2. Close your eyes as you stand in front of them.
3. Breath deeply and try to feel something without touching.
4. Consciously focus on the energy in front of you.
5. Observe the magic unfold.

7. Reticulated Senses

We exist in a world where everything supposedly started at one point and then divided into infinite forms of life. Our reticulated senses need to be stimulated by actually exploring the outdoors so that we don’t miss out on certain scents and other vibrant experiences. Along the way, we have become more in touch with the visual side of this imagined reality of social media and web-based virtual reality. Due to the fact that division from the whole is a natural process in our evolution, we now exist in a world filled with a multitude of differing perceptions; different realities. We are all hallucinating realities into existence: Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, Bitcoin etc. These all started in someone’s imagination, and are now considered as objective entities that make up our world. The truth is that, the only truly objective reality exists in nature. It exists what was here before us. In what we did not consciously create — or did we? With understanding that everything is reticulating, I believe it to be important in taking the positives from the whole experience. If you are worried about doing something that you are passionate about because of what people might think of you, just remember that there will always be people that love you, and those that don’t. This is inescapable. We cannot escape the fact that everyone sees the world in their own way, so you might as well take encouragement from it. Get excited in knowing that you have your own tribe that will love and understand you completely. When all is said and done with the divisible realities of perception, we are only left with the one. A return to your higher self. One love.

8. The Multiple Personality Order

Since Split hit cinemas in 2016, many more people have become familiar with multiple personality disorder. All these so-called disorders are interesting with how they are perceived. They are only perceived as disorders because the person is not consciously aware of it. For example, a person with multiple personality disorder may take an action or say something one day, and the next day will not even realise what they did or said the previous day. This is seen as a disorder (it is not in order). They have no control. But how many of us realise that maybe we all have multiple personalities? Not just those that we are conscious of — like the different faces we wear to different places — but also the personalities that are perceived by others in this mass reticulation of perception. One person might perceive you as a benevolent being with great intentions, and maybe that is because you fit perfectly into their idealistic reality. Whereas another person might see you as the enemy, as someone that is doing pointless and terrible things because you don’t quite fit into their belief system or intellectual frequency. This is the world we live in. The truth is that many of us have multiple personalities. I definitely do. Those close to me know this, but because of my own self-awareness, I have control in choosing which person I wish to be. We can all do this. We were doing this since we were children using our imaginations at play time. This is the multiple personality order of life, and it is a wonderful order of play. You have to play with life because it is about having fun — we are all actors in the greatest movie of all: life.

9. Awareness Has No Opinion

A trap I fell into when I became obsessed with resisting against what I believed to be atrocities in the world was that I thought I was highly aware of things going in the world. I believed that it was important that everyone was made aware of these things. I would push all of the information on people like a martyr-activist. Little did I know that in fact this was not awareness. Awareness has no opinions. Awareness understands that everything that occurs in this world — no matter how good or bad — does not matter in the grand scheme of things. Awareness flows whatever the weather. No matter what has happened on this planet today, the sun will still rise tomorrow. I was quite unaware in my illusive awareness. People get caught in this all the time. How many people watch the news because they believe they must be aware of what is happening in the world. The news is not objective. If it was, then it would be half a report on positives and half on negative. That is objectivism; balance. We are being led astray to believe we are aware, when actually we are being made aware of terror that we do not need to be made aware of so that we keep living with fear, not taking risks in following our passions. We even lack belief in other people, and would rather doubt them because it fits into our negative-awareness-bubble. How many people will buy from the big corporate business that has no connection to them at all rather than supporting their close friend’s business. Everyone has been sucked into an industrial awareness that they want you to be part of, rather than shifting the paradigm positively in your own favour and just being. Awareness does not speak. Awareness does not care. Awareness just is.

10. Egoic Versus Non-Egoic

We can see that there are 2 types of awareness. On one hand, we have the egoic awareness which is responsible for being aware of that which exists in our immediate imagined reality — or even outside of that immediate reality (which we really do not need to know). An egoic awareness is important for getting ahead within the imagined reality, and furthering your character’s skills for planning and organisation. Egoic awareness is what is seen as the most commendable awareness in this reality, and it is important. I would argue that we must create a grand awareness by balancing both the egoic with the non-egoic awareness. What would this look like? I can tell you what it would not look like. It would not look like someone that is so aware of what they must do in the next 10 years that they forget to stop and enjoy today. Neither would it look like the other end of the spectrum where someone loses grips with the imagined reality and ends up lost in the chaos of non-egoic awareness where they cannot function within any sort of structure. We already have people that are tuned into this grand awareness. We also have those that have become lost in the chaotic flow of non-egoic awareness, where they are tuned into a totally different plain of existence that does not allow them to communicate in a way that is comprehendible for the egos anymore — this can be beautiful, but it can get ugly too. The ego exists for a reason, and so I believe that it is just about balancing the 2 and doing your best to stay in a perpetual state of homeostasis in body, mind and soul. The grand awareness is all about balance: Yin and Yang.

To watch the full playlist of 1-minute videos, click the link below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKBUdEybaWk&list=PLlXZaBJSGPT4hAXsHq91n1r6fuTPAr-cJ