We all wrestle at somepoint with the question, ‘who am I’ and ‘what is this life-stuff about?’, and in this post, we will dive into what the deepest part of ourselves is, how it gets clouded out by conditioning, and how we can find ourselves. In doing so, the purpose of our life and life itself is disclosed from within. So, let’s dive in! 

The Constant Companion to Your Existence: Awareness

Now, the knower is more than a thought or a bundle of perceptions that crystalise into a unique personality and set of lenses for looking at things. While these aspects do not need to be discarded, they can cause trouble when we mistake acquired identities and beliefs for who we are! 

Awareness is the baseline upon which the rest of your consciousness and experience of life is built. When awareness is clouded out and displaced from its primacy of place, various turns of suffering take hold in our lives, and much of it is unneccessary! We often get into this position through conditioning. Conditioning and wounding add a kind of felt-force in us that compels us to act, think and feel certain ways, and these impulses can feel necessary and even objective in nature. However, this is not the truth. 

Conditioning and Suffering

Conditioning becomes suffering when we form attachments to outcomes in life and this process of attached-conditioning is something we all go through. The attachment is, at its deepest root, borne out of a fear of death (a sense of self, an ‘I’, is born and thus goes on to realise its own death and fragility). Falling under this wider category are things like fear of starvation, isolation, and disconnection. When we’re younger, we’re highly sensitive, and being born into a world of attached-conditioning, we come to pick up these tendencies ourselves and in doing so, forget our true nature, discard and distort parts of ourselves, and live to survive rather than thrive.

Our conscious personality, this ‘I’ sense, then goes on to split the world into universalised shoulds and shouldn’ts, likes and dislikes, truths and untruths, and so on. Clingings and aversions to things arise and motivate our lives, causing cycles of suffering and pleasure, quite like the Buddhist conception of the wheel of Samsara. If we have a negative, that means there’s a plus, and vice versa. By splitting ourselves off from within, the world is split up as well, and then the wheel turns. By taking on an attached and ultimately illusory static image of ourselves, we become subject to these cycles of pain and pleasure and repeating them. 

Now, whether it happens more or less harmoniously, the effect of all of this conditioning is to build a developed conscious personality that is able to navigate the world, see patterns, make decisions, and go on the journey of life and respond to its demands. However, the development of this mentalised personality can obscure the baseline of awareness, like clouds under pure sky, and then the water forgets what it was originally reflecting. A person comes to be saddled with the same thoughts, routines, beliefs, and experiences, locked in this conditioned self like a caterpillar that had a cocoon weaved around it; forgetful of its capacity to remould it and even get beyond it!

Before all of this is properly developed, we can see that by and large, children by contrast, exhibit quite a lot of joy, openness, and creativity. Of course, things like tantrums and the terrible twos happen, but this is simply the expression of evolutionary impulses wired into a human being to help them to survive and develop. Tantrums are the expression of an emerging and increasingly mentalised will that doesn’t simply call for help as a baby would, but one that is asserting and pushing boundaries. 

The question is, why do adults lose the positive stuff, but still by and large, act-out like kids in some way, shape, or form? Don’t we lose it at the wheel, throw tantrums, get grumpy, and say things to the effect of ‘I don’t wanna play with you anymore!’? The loss of the positivity of childhood is coupled with the disconnect from the baseline of awareness and presence in favour of a fixed mental identity. As a result, those qualities of joy, openness and creativity recede and await reactivation; a possibility for anyone willing to change.

Now you could say that adults lose touch with these qualities on an evolutionary basis, but there’s plenty of us who have found and keep a balance of both. It’s just not an either/or situation! It should be remembered that self-consciousness and techno-modernity has taken humanity far beyond the pace of biological evolution and that the predicament of today’s world and our intelligence is much more likely to be the cause for despair and closed-offness, rather than them being a helpful evolutionary adaptation! 

Transforming the Conditioned-Crystalisation of Consciousness

So by developing a conscious personality, a meshwork of memories, emotions, thoughts, beliefs and identities begins to structure together and crystalise. This happens at a conscious and unconscious level. The facets of our psyche get cemented and rigid as a result, and the friction that arises from this rigidness causes suffering and cycling. The liberation of returning to awareness, presence, and curiosity to our experience (rather than assumption!) can harmonise these parts to be more supple, flexible, and responsive to life. 

We do not lose ourselves by doing this. It’s more the case that like a kaleidoscope, we are able to fluidly bring together and take apart structures for looking at things based on context and responsiveness, rather than via repeated projection and assumption. By being self-aware of the wounds and desires that drive our aversions and clingings, we can be more responsive and not succumb as we once had to the one-sided impulses and reactive patterns that were set up to defend ourselves. We can flow and enjoy the ride, while still being at the wheel. 

The Process of Healing and Finding Ourselves

Awareness is whole and imminent, and immersing it into partialities, pictures, and figments based on attached-conditioning, is to bring ourselves apart. Directing attention back to being in awareness has a healing and curative effect in itself. Awareness is the nexus point of consciousness that can meet the ongoing transmission of life in it’s whole fluid context; awareness connects with and weaves together the workings of body and mind at all layers, including the genetic and ancestral level, as well as the level of energetic fields. When we live from the neck-up, the capacity for awareness to holistically synthesise and process experience to its full depth is shut out.

For most people who have become accustomed to thinking and an emotional and conditional way of life that’s gone astray from the present moment as their anchor, the process of cultivating unconditional attention to the moment can take some persistence. However, there are certain habits and techniques that can make this process easier: 

• Planting Positive thoughts: positive thoughts have a less compulsive quality than negative ones. You don’t overthink how nice a tree is! But you can overthink an anxious concern and then the head-space gets busy! The difference is because negative thinking is about assuring control to avoid something we see as bad, but when you love and appreciate something, there is less concern for all that. When negative thoughts happen, just witness and accept them, and then offer a more whole, balanced, and positive thought as an alternative. For example, ‘I’m broken’ can be accepted and felt in the body for a moment, and then recontextualised into something like ‘There is a feeling of brokenness inside that arises from past thoughts and experiences, but this is not the truth, I am more than that. I choose to value myself and love myself’.
• Transcendental meditation: Great for beginners, TM offers the mind something to chew on in the form of a repeated mantra word, while the focus of the person is concentrated on it or the breath as well. Mantra words and simple guides are widely available online. 
• Nervous system regulation techniques: In my article on the healing of the heart, a range of techniques are given that help to bring the nervous system back into balance. Some of them take just a few minutes. When our body is calm, it calms the mind, making it easier to access presence and positive thoughts. 
• Gratitude practice: Make a habit to take some time, maybe at the end of the day, to recount the positive things going on in your life; what you appreciate and are grateful for. This reinforces the mind’s focus on the positive and acts as a helpful reminder that there is much goodness in our lives. This may feel awkward at first but like all unfamiliar things, awkwardness and fear become a flowing, fluent habit that we can embody and enjoy! 

That self-awareness starts to increasingly see ‘other’ also as self. This is because through the process of integration, we allow various aspects of ourselves to come into awareness and appreciation. All of a sudden, we’re all humans and we know what it’s like to have wounds and motivations even if the specifics differ between us, and we also see how the wounds and intrinsic qualities that we have motivates a range of human behaviours. Now, seeing an irritating thing like the expression of bravado or passive-aggression is seen as an expression of pain and desire to avoid it, or at least as something that we’re prone to doing too! 

This kind of understanding extinguishes the suffering and confusions that arise in life’s mundanities and outrageous twists alike. There is more calm overall; in feeling rooted in nature, common humanity, in the mixed picture of one’s own life that fits into a bigger picture. There is self-forgiveness, for one’s own seeming foolishness and mistakes. A valuing of life as being about process rather than results and fixed pictures. Presence and integration is like taking a big chill-pill in this way. 

As with prior ages, ahead of the next epoch on earth, humanity will be forced to come to terms with the cumulative consequences of its past. All of us will be called upon by our inner life and outer circumstances to live in a more balanced, authentic, principled, nurturing, harmonic, and related way. The rise of mental health issues, global unrest, the melting ice caps, and health problems are symptomatic of the mounting tempo of a split-off and tensious collective psyche. One multiplied by the misuse of technology that reflects and amplifies the collective tensions and the drive for glory and life ever-lasting by a species gone rather mad! 

We must look at the unlookable to reconnect with our wholeness and find a way forward as individuals and as a collective. We must let awareness see it, presence heal it, and from that inner stance and change, embody a way that can preserve and enrich the whole of earth for the times ahead. It is not the case that we are lone islands; beyond appearances, there is a unity that connects and transcends the very cosmos itself. Guiding it’s way to full realisation of itself, as itself. 

It proclaims these words in its eternal self-knowledge and anticipation of recognising itself in time with ever-greater brilliance in form. It says: I am. We are. I love you. It is so.