
The “I” of Awareness
If we were really honest and looked very closely, I think we’d find that a great deal of our time is spent managing our own space, our space bubble, our field of experience.
We’re either annoyed with it or motivated by it. We’re either seeing to its demands or contemplating it. But we’re constantly paying attention to it, in the background or foreground of our awareness, responding to how we feel even though, if asked, most people probably couldn’t name how they feel. (1)
The dance we do with our feelings doesn’t require us to know which feeling it is. The pilot doesn’t ask of the wind whether it’s a west or a north wind. He or she just flies, responding to it.
I’ve been sitting next to a man in a Starbucks who spoke very loudly and rapidly in another language on his cellphone for maybe twenty minutes before he left. I had all manner of hateful thoughts towards him by the time he went.
If the Mother hadn’t reminded us not to say it if it wasn’t of love, I’d have been my usual straightforward, self-righteous self.
But now here I was left, agitated, hate-filled. I watched how that feeling state colored everything. In all of it I constructed events so that I was assured of coming out looking right and good.
I’d probably spend hours afterwards going over those events and laundering my account of them.
Our society has gotten up to honoring what’s right. But I don’t think we’ve gotten up yet to honoring what is of love. I could be wrong. But I think that’s out ahead of us.
So I sat there, feeling triggered, a monster in waiting, until the next thought and feeling shanghaied me again.
And that’s pretty well a typical description of how my day goes when I’m out and about in society. In and out of self-righteousness when things don’t go my way.
The only thing I have going for me, that saves me from being just another old grump, is that I’m aware of all this. I watch myself. I see what I do. I don’t wait for someone to call me. I call myself.
I make note of each noticing. Some result in realizations; some in new experiences; some in upset.
But I learn from them all.
Footnotes
(1) At least that’s been my experience. As a society, I think we’re largely out of touch with the way we feel.