Awareness: Getting Out of the Blind Spot of Your Self
Publication Date: 3.02.2024
Category: Being Together
Author: Marina Yurievna Perepelitsyna
Self-awareness begins with the desire and decision to look within. Since the mid-90s, I have been working on my own awareness, tirelessly and continuously, and I have also been continuously participating in the process of awareness of clients. Often, when we share with our daughter, who has been a Gestalt therapist for over twenty years, about yet another insight, we each time agree that awareness deserves a monument, and this is not a joke at all. It cannot be overestimated because it can lead to clarity of what really is. An amazing and unique opportunity given by nature itself, and which over the last hundred years has become the property of a huge number of people, despite its considerable age of several thousand years. Ancient wisdom and modern science have come together in our time as never before.
Indian myth describes the mind as a caged, crazy monkey, dancing as if it had just been stung by a wasp. Every moment we are filled with racing thoughts for a variety of reasons. They rush through our minds, and you yourself know how difficult it is sometimes to stop this flow, especially in moments of anxiety about one thing or another. But he is just a veil of what really is.
Once, about ten years ago, I gave a master class. And at the very beginning I proposed an experiment: I threw several strange objects through the rows that could be examined and touched, and then asked them to guess what these objects were. They did not understand what these objects were and endlessly fantasized, interpreted, expressed a bunch of conjectures, looked for their practical applicability, and even found their own meanings.
It didn’t even occur to them that they could ask me, and I would be happy to tell about each one. They “played” a guessing game about unknown objects. All they saw: one object was made of a small piece of wood, the second was copper wire, and the third resembled a tiny straw napkin.
In fact, I bought a wooden object in New York at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: I really wanted something to remember the museum, but everything was very expensive, and I bought this tiny designer souvenir. The second item - I will never part with it - is a certain thing that looks like a puzzle made of copper wire, changing its shape with every turn. I work with this subject exclusively with clients who cannot overcome any crisis existential difficulties in their lives. This item was made by a man on the street of Main Bazaar, who did not have a single arm or a single leg. And this object is a real monument to human adaptation. I made the third item myself to cover the baby cactus, which I brought from Switzerland back in the 90s. The babies of this old decorative cactus were born very frail and died, and I really wanted to breed them, and then I came up with this tiny cape - the cacti survived under it. That's the whole fairy tale.
What is not a fairy tale is that in any situation we will always find and attribute our own meanings to any phenomenon, even if this is galactically far from the truth.
And the sharing at the master class after this work lasted about two hours, we worked on understanding what was happening here and now. The sharing was wet with tears, but it brought countless insights to the participants: about the fact that “he always has a mustache”; and about “I will not deign to ask questions”; and about “a mask called “I don’t care at all””; and about exclusive trust in your fantasies, and then not knowing what to do with the results of these fantasies. There was a lot, but many said that they could not imagine that in one experiment in fifteen minutes, then in two hours, they could realize several ways that ruin half their life.
What is the average person's awareness of reality? I don’t want to disappoint you, as E. Fromm once disappointed me by calling “half-asleep” what the average person calls reality. But, unfortunately, he is right: a person represents reality as a set of his own fictions and illusions, constructed into concepts by his mind. And what he does not realize is reality. I’ll disappoint you twice, but the average person is aware of about 1.5% of what he really is. Everything is hidden in the depths of his subconscious.
According to David Eagleman, a renowned and popular neuroscientist, the subconscious mind plays a much more important role in our everyday decisions and relationships than one might think. Our consciousness registers events with such a long delay that its opinion about what is happening actually does not matter. Remember how many words you said in this life that you regretted, but later. How many situations have you chewed over in the evenings, but not at the moment that required a different way out?
And how many things you invent for yourself about those with whom you live or meet - it’s good if you check at least a small part of it with the source of your experiences. And when they tell you what is, your answer most likely sounds: “oh well,” and you once again believe yourself. But, if you sometimes believe scientists, then in the words of the same Eagleman, “consciousness - what turns on when we wake up in the morning - represents the smallest fraction of what is happening in our heads. It is like a cramped closet in a vast estate brain." Maybe, when once again it seems to you that you know everything, for everyone and about everyone, you will ask and clarify directly?
A little food for your erudition. Translating the word awareness from English into Russian is difficult because it does not have an exact equivalent. If you still try to find a definition and meaning, then awareness is a phenomenon that allows a person to live not automatically. Typically, everyone gets confused between understanding how awareness differs from consciousness. But there is a significant difference between them.
Consciousness is the state of your wakefulness, in which all the mental activity of the body is actively working: perception, attention, memory, feeling sensations and experiences, and many of its other functions. And awareness is a bridge along which insights come from the subconscious, as a result of your focusing on some aspect, like lanterns illuminating dark places. As a rule, these are some events or old experiences that have moved into your subconscious, which you didn’t even consciously think about or didn’t pay attention to.
But when you cannot understand something in your own behavior or reactions, remember how many times you exclaim “why the hell did I say that”, “I don’t understand what fly bit me”, “I don’t understand how I could get into it with him/her.” It is at such moments that you begin to seriously think about your own actions, decisions or reactions. And then the opportunity to understand the origins of your misunderstandings, or true desires and needs, or experiences, opens up before you with the help of insights, sometimes to the point of complete amazement at your unexpected discoveries.
For example, when you listened to a lecture and found similarities in the information received with your life or situation, it seems to you that now you can change everything, that now you finally understand everything, and therefore you know where and what grew in this situation and what needs to be done. But this example illustrates intellectual understanding as the work of your consciousness: processing information, listening to a lecturer, abstract thinking “it’s like that for me,” a rational decision about what and how can be done. We will in no way devalue the intellectual level of understanding; we have no right to call it useless or inappropriate. You deliberately went to the lectures, listened carefully to everything, she enlightened you. But the thing is that if you expect changes, then in reality, such understanding very rarely leads to behavioral changes. You will forcefully try to change yourself, you will honestly try very hard, even make promises to yourself, but it is the consciousness, not built on the yellow bricks of happiness in Oz, that will resist. Alas…
Let's practice some more. For example, now you are reading these lines, and you naturally understand what you are doing and even understand that you are holding a book or reading gadget in your hands. But you don’t know how many lines of text you read? You don’t even know how this text hooked you - to do this, you need to read, also concentrate on yourself in order to realize how it responds inside you. Someone even exclaimed with irritation: “Nothing,” and someone listened to themselves and realized that they had been putting off going to the toilet for an hour. So we figured it out. Consciousness is the understanding of words, actions - everything that you do. And awareness is the feeling of what and how happens inside when you do something.
Well done, that's right - it's both an emotional and mental process. The mind united with the heart is a much broader type of awareness. Today we repeat, like a mantra, “I am as I am” and we want our partners to perceive us that way. Do you know what this is really about? Are you really able to understand others, with a clear vision of them as they are, in all their humanity, without connection with our ideas and opinions about them?! If yes, I'm proud of you. If you honestly admit that you don’t understand what this is about, I’ll tell you a story about myself.
In one Tibetan parable, a person without awareness is compared to a cart, passengers are his desires, horses are the muscles of the body. Awareness is a sleeping coachman, and while he sleeps, the carriage will drive aimlessly here and there. The passengers have different goals, and the horses pull in different directions, threatening to overturn the cart here and there. If the coachman-driver wakes up and takes the reins, he will force the horses to take the passengers where they need to go. In those moments when awareness connects with feelings, sensations, movement and thinking, the cart moves along the right path. And man makes discoveries, invents, creates and lives.
Now you understand that Awakening, Enlightenment and Transformation are for everyone. This is not the lot of hermits or saints, as you and I think. It is not only for us, Gestalt therapists (it is true, our main tool of work). It's for you too. You can all expand your awareness, experience your insights, and it will bring and give you a lot of new strength for life, including for the steam room. Our brain changes after small and large enlightenments, this neurological ability is built into our brain, into our consciousness. The brain changes very slowly, but insight changes it instantly, shifting consciousness in spontaneous experience. “The mind, once expanded its boundaries, will never return to its former ones” - let’s believe the genius of Einstein.
Indian myth describes the mind as a caged, crazy monkey, dancing as if it had just been stung by a wasp. Every moment we are filled with racing thoughts for a variety of reasons. They rush through our minds, and you yourself know how difficult it is sometimes to stop this flow, especially in moments of anxiety about one thing or another. But he is just a veil of what really is.
Once, about ten years ago, I gave a master class. And at the very beginning I proposed an experiment: I threw several strange objects through the rows that could be examined and touched, and then asked them to guess what these objects were. They did not understand what these objects were and endlessly fantasized, interpreted, expressed a bunch of conjectures, looked for their practical applicability, and even found their own meanings.
It didn’t even occur to them that they could ask me, and I would be happy to tell about each one. They “played” a guessing game about unknown objects. All they saw: one object was made of a small piece of wood, the second was copper wire, and the third resembled a tiny straw napkin.
In fact, I bought a wooden object in New York at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: I really wanted something to remember the museum, but everything was very expensive, and I bought this tiny designer souvenir. The second item - I will never part with it - is a certain thing that looks like a puzzle made of copper wire, changing its shape with every turn. I work with this subject exclusively with clients who cannot overcome any crisis existential difficulties in their lives. This item was made by a man on the street of Main Bazaar, who did not have a single arm or a single leg. And this object is a real monument to human adaptation. I made the third item myself to cover the baby cactus, which I brought from Switzerland back in the 90s. The babies of this old decorative cactus were born very frail and died, and I really wanted to breed them, and then I came up with this tiny cape - the cacti survived under it. That's the whole fairy tale.
What is not a fairy tale is that in any situation we will always find and attribute our own meanings to any phenomenon, even if this is galactically far from the truth.
And the sharing at the master class after this work lasted about two hours, we worked on understanding what was happening here and now. The sharing was wet with tears, but it brought countless insights to the participants: about the fact that “he always has a mustache”; and about “I will not deign to ask questions”; and about “a mask called “I don’t care at all””; and about exclusive trust in your fantasies, and then not knowing what to do with the results of these fantasies. There was a lot, but many said that they could not imagine that in one experiment in fifteen minutes, then in two hours, they could realize several ways that ruin half their life.
What is the average person's awareness of reality? I don’t want to disappoint you, as E. Fromm once disappointed me by calling “half-asleep” what the average person calls reality. But, unfortunately, he is right: a person represents reality as a set of his own fictions and illusions, constructed into concepts by his mind. And what he does not realize is reality. I’ll disappoint you twice, but the average person is aware of about 1.5% of what he really is. Everything is hidden in the depths of his subconscious.
According to David Eagleman, a renowned and popular neuroscientist, the subconscious mind plays a much more important role in our everyday decisions and relationships than one might think. Our consciousness registers events with such a long delay that its opinion about what is happening actually does not matter. Remember how many words you said in this life that you regretted, but later. How many situations have you chewed over in the evenings, but not at the moment that required a different way out?
And how many things you invent for yourself about those with whom you live or meet - it’s good if you check at least a small part of it with the source of your experiences. And when they tell you what is, your answer most likely sounds: “oh well,” and you once again believe yourself. But, if you sometimes believe scientists, then in the words of the same Eagleman, “consciousness - what turns on when we wake up in the morning - represents the smallest fraction of what is happening in our heads. It is like a cramped closet in a vast estate brain." Maybe, when once again it seems to you that you know everything, for everyone and about everyone, you will ask and clarify directly?
A little food for your erudition. Translating the word awareness from English into Russian is difficult because it does not have an exact equivalent. If you still try to find a definition and meaning, then awareness is a phenomenon that allows a person to live not automatically. Typically, everyone gets confused between understanding how awareness differs from consciousness. But there is a significant difference between them.
Consciousness is the state of your wakefulness, in which all the mental activity of the body is actively working: perception, attention, memory, feeling sensations and experiences, and many of its other functions. And awareness is a bridge along which insights come from the subconscious, as a result of your focusing on some aspect, like lanterns illuminating dark places. As a rule, these are some events or old experiences that have moved into your subconscious, which you didn’t even consciously think about or didn’t pay attention to.
But when you cannot understand something in your own behavior or reactions, remember how many times you exclaim “why the hell did I say that”, “I don’t understand what fly bit me”, “I don’t understand how I could get into it with him/her.” It is at such moments that you begin to seriously think about your own actions, decisions or reactions. And then the opportunity to understand the origins of your misunderstandings, or true desires and needs, or experiences, opens up before you with the help of insights, sometimes to the point of complete amazement at your unexpected discoveries.
For example, when you listened to a lecture and found similarities in the information received with your life or situation, it seems to you that now you can change everything, that now you finally understand everything, and therefore you know where and what grew in this situation and what needs to be done. But this example illustrates intellectual understanding as the work of your consciousness: processing information, listening to a lecturer, abstract thinking “it’s like that for me,” a rational decision about what and how can be done. We will in no way devalue the intellectual level of understanding; we have no right to call it useless or inappropriate. You deliberately went to the lectures, listened carefully to everything, she enlightened you. But the thing is that if you expect changes, then in reality, such understanding very rarely leads to behavioral changes. You will forcefully try to change yourself, you will honestly try very hard, even make promises to yourself, but it is the consciousness, not built on the yellow bricks of happiness in Oz, that will resist. Alas…
Let's practice some more. For example, now you are reading these lines, and you naturally understand what you are doing and even understand that you are holding a book or reading gadget in your hands. But you don’t know how many lines of text you read? You don’t even know how this text hooked you - to do this, you need to read, also concentrate on yourself in order to realize how it responds inside you. Someone even exclaimed with irritation: “Nothing,” and someone listened to themselves and realized that they had been putting off going to the toilet for an hour. So we figured it out. Consciousness is the understanding of words, actions - everything that you do. And awareness is the feeling of what and how happens inside when you do something.
Well done, that's right - it's both an emotional and mental process. The mind united with the heart is a much broader type of awareness. Today we repeat, like a mantra, “I am as I am” and we want our partners to perceive us that way. Do you know what this is really about? Are you really able to understand others, with a clear vision of them as they are, in all their humanity, without connection with our ideas and opinions about them?! If yes, I'm proud of you. If you honestly admit that you don’t understand what this is about, I’ll tell you a story about myself.
In one Tibetan parable, a person without awareness is compared to a cart, passengers are his desires, horses are the muscles of the body. Awareness is a sleeping coachman, and while he sleeps, the carriage will drive aimlessly here and there. The passengers have different goals, and the horses pull in different directions, threatening to overturn the cart here and there. If the coachman-driver wakes up and takes the reins, he will force the horses to take the passengers where they need to go. In those moments when awareness connects with feelings, sensations, movement and thinking, the cart moves along the right path. And man makes discoveries, invents, creates and lives.
Now you understand that Awakening, Enlightenment and Transformation are for everyone. This is not the lot of hermits or saints, as you and I think. It is not only for us, Gestalt therapists (it is true, our main tool of work). It's for you too. You can all expand your awareness, experience your insights, and it will bring and give you a lot of new strength for life, including for the steam room. Our brain changes after small and large enlightenments, this neurological ability is built into our brain, into our consciousness. The brain changes very slowly, but insight changes it instantly, shifting consciousness in spontaneous experience. “The mind, once expanded its boundaries, will never return to its former ones” - let’s believe the genius of Einstein.