Unaware

 

Dec. 25

Self-awareness is not a proposition for happiness.

It’s commonplace for people to think that if they are self-aware, their life will be better. Human beings don’t realize how much of their so-called “happiness” depends precisely on not being self-aware. To be asleep, to be functionally un-conscious of one's inner life and how one is both inside and outside, allows perception and awareness to dismiss the many extraordinary contradictions that one has within one, as well as the powerfully tempered and hardened selfishness one nurses as though it were the most precious thing one had.

To be self-aware is to be thrust, without compromise and in the absence of any refuge, into the middle of these questions in such a way that one cannot escape them. 

One has to actually be with oneself; and I can’t think of anything less “pleasant.” 

The word pleasant is derived from the Latin placere, which means (among other things) to calm. When we are pleased, we are placated. We are placid. We remain undisturbed by what takes place. This is the ordinary state of consciousness without self awareness: it spends much of its time in fantasy and egoistic inflections about how great one is. So long as this goes unexamined through functional awareness of the moment and an ability to see our inner lives, we can be happy a good deal of the time. We can be pleased. We can pretend that everything is just hunky-dory for large swaths of time, until the next event that upsets the apple cart comes along. Because we have no continuous awareness of this condition in our moment-to-moment examination of self, we remain oblivious to the situation.

Self-awareness requires us to be with ourselves throughout the day, not in intermittent flashes of insight. This can be a trying, difficult, and disturbing experience. It relates to Christ’s comment about the Son of Man having nowhere to rest his head. There is no place within true self-awareness in which to take refuge. This fox has no den. 

I bring this up in large part because I spend most of my life in communities of people who are, at least superficially, wholly devoted to the pursuit of self-awareness. I’m not sure they know what they would be getting if they had it. For the average person, in fact, I think self-awareness is possibly the worst thing one could get. It takes an extraordinary constitution, one forged in a crucible of inner and outer suffering, to tolerate a psychological condition of this kind. If it were not accompanied by other important phenomenon such as the organic sensation of Being, it would be devastating. Only the balance of manifestation through the mind of the body prevents it from tipping the applecart all the way over; and hence the need for a firm foundation in sensation before anything else happens. It is what will keep you upright if you want actual self-awareness.

We are not the creatures we think we are or the creatures we believe we wish ourselves to be. If we face the creatures we are, we're sure to become confounded. It’s almost certainly beyond the purview of our own average understanding to fathom ourselves. We can only rely on assistance from a metaphysical realm that we have little knowledge of or access to. Surrender of this kind puts the ego firmly in its place; but it never stops squirming. And this is another thing that will have to be lived with throughout every day.

Strange to say that if there is refuge here, it lies in the realm of ritual and bells, of Psalm and prayer, of hymnal and devotion. There is something about the vibration of consistency in a religious context that helps to focus effort per the statement I scrawled on a piece of paper earlier this year which sat on my desk for months reminding me of this condition that cannot be escaped.

“I return to you in faith.”

This return is the only place that one can turn one’s attention. 

It must be done repeatedly and without expectation of reward. 

It must be done understanding that there is no place in our lives, if we wish to know ourselves, for anything but God. 

Yet we are filled with ourselves; and it is the suffering of this exact condition itself that is necessary. We will not be filled with anything but ourselves until we've managed to see all of ourselves in such a way that we can no longer tolerate ourselves, no longer find solace in the platitudes we feed ourselves, no longer trust what we are to be anything but this tiny, uninformed, unintelligent, disobedient self. 

Finding myself in the midst of this process, I have no great insight, no advice. 

I myself simply return in faith every morning. 

I have nowhere else to go.

May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.