Virtue 3: Awareness
Wednesday, February 13th, 2008Note: This is part 3 of a 4 part series, not including the introduction and conclusion. The introduction is titled Peaceful Virtues, and has links to the rest of the articles in the series.
A manager went to his programmers and told them: “As regards to your work hours: you are going to have to come in at nine in the morning and leave at five in the afternoon.” At this, all of them became angry and several resigned on the spot.
So the manager said: “All right, in that case you may set your own working hours, as long as you finish your projects on schedule.” The programmers, now satisfied, began to come in at noon and work to the wee hours of the morning.
– The Tao of Programming
This virtue is the key to finding peace within the objective reality of right now.
One thing that must be understood, though, is that the past does not exist anymore. It used to, certainly, but it evolved into the present. All of the parts that made up the past were recycled and now make up the present… Not one bit of the past still exists.
This is a stretch, I know. Certainly we can find fossils in the ground, or even see notes we wrote on a slip of paper two minutes ago… Yet, the truth is that those fossils exist right now, as do the notes. They might have also existed in the past, but they only exist right now.
Originally, I wanted to start this post off by jumping right into Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, so that I could explain how everything exists only right now. I’ll still cover that topic, but I’m going to use that material as a post script, including it only in the comments section, because it is a really distant tangent, even for me.
Suffice it to say, Relativity only seems to say that time is an extra dimension, but actually says that the only time that exists is right now. For those who want to know more, read on to the comments.
Instead, I’ll explain what we can do with right now, and why awareness is important.
Momentum
Everything is in motion. We all know that the Earth revolves around the Sun, and that the Sun moves throughout the galaxy. Our galaxy also moves around, relative to all of the other galaxies in our universe. The only constant is motion… And, everything that is in motion tends to stay in motion.
While standing on the surface of the Earth, we tend to see a lot of things standing still… In fact, it is very useful to believe that most things are standing still. After all, a map that describes the territory completely and accurately is no better of a map than the territory itself, so believing that a tall building isn’t moving is very useful to simplify things. Just remember, if you’re trying to move a mountain, it is already moving by itself.
How do we control where a car moves to? We simply change its path of least resistance by turning its wheels. Momentum does the rest. How do we walk? We simply fall forward, keep our feet under us, and momentum does the rest. For the vast majority of movements we want to make, the easiest way to make a change is to change the path of least resistance.
Awareness
Our awareness only exists within the great span of time we call Now. Fortunately, objective reality only exists within Now as well, so we can be aware of objective reality. We can change it, push it, pull it, or if we want to, we can ignore it.
The primary purpose of awareness is to give us a space where we can make decisions. Awareness, however, is firmly planted within our subjective world… All of the information about our world comes through our senses, gets filtered, and only if our senses deem something as important, or if we decide to be aware of our senses, will that information be noticed by our awareness. Our awareness also drifts into our memories and into our imagination, allowing us to compare information from the past and plan for things in the future. While we are remembering, we are not planning, nor are we aware of our senses. While we are aware of our sense, we are not remembering, nor are we planning. And, to be complete, while we are planning, we are neither aware of our senses or remembering. Our consciousness drifts between these three states, giving our memories, our imagination, and our senses instructions that they carry out largely automatically.
While I’m writing this, I use my imagination to plan out a phrase. I then compare that phrase to my memory, figuring out individual words and letters. I then give those words and letters to my motor-neurons, telling them to type it out. While I’m typing, I’m starting the sequence over again, imagining my next phrase, or using my memory to compare what I’ve written, what I intend to write, and my experiences to make certain that they all match. My motor-neurons are happily telling my fingers, hands, and arms what moves to make, and I’m completely unconscious of the individual letters as they’re being typed on the screen, blissfully unaware of the hundreds of minute muscle movements required to move my fingers from one key to the next.
From time to time, I run out of phrases to type, and I have to be more conscious of my imagination. All too often, I can’t find the right word, and I have to search my memory for a word that fits. As each of these problems show up, my muscles run out of instructions, and I stop typing, but I don’t notice that I’ve stopped until it is time to start typing again, when I give my body instructions to move. This arrangement allows me to multi-task. Instead of having to come up with a long series of phrases, then find the right words, then tell my muscles which letters to type, I set my imagination to a task, set my memory to another task, and set my muscles to the third task, and they all get accomplished at the same time, with the minimum amount of awareness.
This is the key of what awareness is, and how we are conscious. Our awareness makes decisions about what to think of next, and then leaves the scene until any one part of the brain either runs out of instructions or gets stuck in processing information.
Our awareness sets our thoughts in motion, and then lets the momentum of our thoughts complete the tasks.
How Being More Aware Helps Us
Our motor-neurons are great at telling our muscles how to repeat a task… This is often called muscle memory, and anybody who types more than ten words per minute knows how that this works. We don’t have to tell our fingers how to press the correct key anymore, we only think of the key we want to press, and for the more experienced, we simply think of the letter, or even the whole word. Walking works the same way… We don’t have to keep track of which foot is in front, and how far extended each leg is… The whole of our conscious thought is usually where we want to be in a few seconds, and our motor-neurons take care of the rest automatically.
The problem with this is that practice doesn’t make perfect, it makes habit. If we practice typing with our pinkies only, then we’ll get extremely good at typing only with our pinkies, able to do it without being consciously aware of how we do it. Consciousness can, if we so choose, override the muscle memory and we would be able to type with our whole hands, but while our awareness was concentrating on where to place each finger, we would be unable to use our memories or imagination to plan our next sentence, slowing us down considerably.
Consciousness, then, is not only a tool to put the rest of our brain to work, but to notice and correct our mistakes. It takes a lot of work to correct a mistake, compared to doing something automatically. Being more aware helps us in two ways:
First, being aware as much as possible right now helps us to find mistakes early, before they become habits.
Second, awareness is a mental muscle, just like willpower is a mental muscle… An untrained brain can only be aware for short periods of time, but as we practice and train our awareness, it gains more endurance, allowing us to become more and more aware as time goes on.
This second point feeds back into the first point… The more aware we are, the more we catch mistakes and prevent them from becoming habits.
Training Your Awareness
Unfortunately, I can’t help very much here. The best thing to do is practice being aware. This part really does depend on each person’s own motivations, time management techniques, and existing habits.
I can say, though, that what works best for me is to have reminders for tasks that I want to work on. This jolts me out of the task at hand, bringing my awareness out of both my imagination and memory, and fully into the current situation. I have my personal data accessory sound an alarm at 7pm every night, reminding me to clean out the litter box, and I find that it works wonderfully at not only reminding me of that one task, but of making me aware of my environment.
I’m seriously considering setting a new reminder at a different time, directly reminding me to be conscious. This way, it doesn’t matter what task I may be reminded of, I’ll run through my plans for the day, look at what tasks I may be procrastinating, and search my environment for tasks that I hadn’t thought of previously.
Awareness Working With Momentum
When we’re not being fully aware, we’re running on pure momentum down the path of least resistance. I’m sure a lot of people know just how bad this can be, and is the common thread behind dead-end jobs, relationships with poor communication, and a generally unimpressive life.
When we are being fully aware, we’re also running on pure momentum down the path of least resistance. Yes, read that again. If you missed it, I just said that we run on pure momentum down the path of least resistance both when we’re fully aware and when we’re unaware. The difference, though, is that you are the one who chooses the path of least resistance, so that your path leads to your goals, dreams, and aspirations.
The road between takes work, and to know how to find the path that you want first requires that you’re honest with yourself, and that you are honest with what you want. Finding your best path also requires that you’re honest with your past and with your feelings, understanding where momentum up until now has taken you, and just how far you need to turn. Of course, dealing with your past requires honest acceptance and forgiveness. As we continue this series, come Monday, we’ll discuss how to decide on the path that you want to take.
Conclusion
If we used an analogy of a road trip to describe this series of posts, first, we described how to select the best map, simply by being Honest. We also described how to read the map, through Acceptance and Forgiveness. Now, with this post on Awareness, we have learned how to drive. Staying with this analogy, our next post will tell us how to pick the best roads from those on the map, by having Responsibility.
Link Love
Probably one of my favorites of Steve Pavlina’s recent posts (before he went on a play-by-play description of his latest 30 day experiment, becoming a “raw” vegetarian) is his thought provoking article asking what the Middle Path is.
For those unfamiliar with the Middle Path, the Buddha encouraged people to avoid extremes… instead of seeking more and more wealth to feed the ego, or perhaps giving up everything (and again feeding the ego), simply live your life within your means and abilities.
While I’m not quite certain where Steve was really going with his post, he certainly sparked conversation on his forums. Give his questions a read, then read the conversation that follows.
Reader Question
This question is simple:
What do you think?