Sunday, September 25, 2005

Awareness

Awareness... A reasonably simple word. Pocket Oxford Dictionary describes Aware as

Aware predic. adj. 1 (often foll. by of or that) conscious; having knowledge. 2 well-informed.  awareness n. [Old English] Usage - Aware is also found used attributively in sense 2, as in ‘a very aware person’, but this should be avoided in formal contexts.

Sometimes, we need to attach more meaning, resolve it into a deeper context and discover a hidden layer of meaning to this word. How often have we been aware of things surrounding us? To what extent can we be aware of things around us?

At times, I have felt that I'm living life as a dream... I'm aware of everything around me, and yet I somehow feel that this very body is but an imaginary entity, something that is temporal. How strange must it be if one feels that the dreamtime is real, and the realtime is a dream. These pockets of time whilst dreaming are far more real, more clear, more detailed, more vivid, have a lot more 'feeling' and 'awareness' attached to them than the live memories of life. Why is it that at some points of time, one is more aware of oneself than at other points of time?

Why is it that some dreams feel so real, and some do not? And sometimes gives rise to the feeling that you are living another life in these dreams? What about those times when the mind is so sharp, that you are able to view something happening in your life as an entity free from the body? Seeing things from a higher plane, even though you are rooted to where you are...

For example, you see a glass falling from a table. Time slows down. That one moment dilates to a few seconds or a couple of minutes. Your mind knows that the glass is falling down and it will shatter to pieces in a few fractions of a second. Yet, it does nothing. YOU do nothing. YOU watch the glass fall... helplessly. It hits the floor, shatters. And you wonder, how is it that your mind was aware of itself, yet you were too slow to absorb the consequences of your awareness. During the period when the glass falls down in a motion that describes a beauty of a higher level, you seem to view the glass differently. There seems to be much more to the glass than the glass itself. How? What? Why?

These are those infinite times when I am not I, and yet I am I. I feel the chaos inside me arising, existing, manifesting... Flowing from me, flowing into me... In an arcane continuum. A link. As being a part of everything, as one attached to everything else in the universe. The feeling is divine. There is no Me, yet there is Me. This feeling is hard to describe. But this feeling is a by-product of thought, and of awareness. This feeling is what links me in a hitherto unknown, unnameable way to the glass.

Yet why is it that we fail to realize that there is a fundamental beauty hidden beneath everything we see, hear, smell, taste and touch?

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