“BEING & CARING, A PSYCHOLOGY FOR LIVING” by Victor Daniels and Laurence J. Horowitz, 1976, 1984
Highlights from the book chosen by The Happy President.
CHAPTER SIX: THE STRUCTURE OF AWARENESS
My awareness if my life. It is the source of my survival. My lack of awareness is my limit, and could mean my end.
Developing our awareness means learning to live in contact with our own experience. We can easily be so caught up in what we’re doing that we don’t realize how we’re doing it. “The question at stake,” declared Epictetus, “is this: Are we in our senses, or are we not?”
WHAT AWARENESS IS – AND ISN’T
Awareness is the sensing of what exists, how it exists, and where and when it exists – its internal and external context. In contrast to knowledge, which is a file cabinet of information we learned in the past, awareness involves present sensing, along with thinking about how present events connect with other aspects of our lives. Just as our direct experience becomes more meaningful when we connect it with the rest of what we know, many educators now are realizing that we learn much more when our thinking occurs in a context of experiencing.
Zen teachers speak of developing a mirror mind that can reflect whatever image falls upon it clearly and without distortion or interpretation.
With awareness, often you don’t need to “figure out” why something is happening. Instead, as you become more aware of your actions and reactions, you begin to discover answers to some of your questions. The evens inside you may just need time to emerge.
What happens with awareness is unpredictable. That’s both the delight and the frustration of discovery.
Full awareness is possible only when seeing, hearing, or grasping the truth is more important than getting something else I want. Otherwise I distort my awareness in the service of my wants.
It’s important to note that self-awareness is totally different from “self-consciousness.” In self-consciousness, as the term is popularly used, a small bit of my attention goes to noticing what I’m doing or how I look. Mostly I’m worrying about what others are thinking about me. Mark Twain observed that others do very little of that kind of thinking, so relax. Just note that if you start to feel self-conscious, it’s a signal to pull your attention out of projective thinking and into active observing.
DEVELOPING OUR AWARENESS
Developing our awareness involves learning to observe the process rather than getting lost in directing it. Otherwise we end up repeating again and again the same old cycles of thought, emotion, or behavior. When we become aware, we can rely on the wisdom of our organism.
There’s essential value in learning to be aware of the obvious.
Awareness and Self-Acceptance
Awareness and self-acceptance are reciprocal. In my fullest awareness I am seeing, hearing, and feeling what is…including my judging of people, events, and things as “bad” or “wrong,” which usually colors or tints my awareness.
When I observe and I accept what I do, think and feel as the way I am now, including my judging behavior as “right” or “wrong,” I can perceive what I”m doing most clearly. Only when I’m aware of what I”m doing do I have the option of doing something else. The exciting paradox is that by accepting and acknowledging myself as completely all right just as I am now, at this instant in my life, new discoveries and directions become available.
Gestalt therapist Stella Resnick elaborates on this process: “When people first start out in therapy…frequently…they are afraid to see themselves because they think they won’t like what they see. They are judging themselves, and this judging is experienced with pain…Witnessing without judging…[reduces] internal conflict and self-victimizations…Growth comes not through goals of unrealistic perfection, but out of a place of inner support and self-love.”
The important even is your observation of what you’re doing, on the inside and the outside, whatever that is.
ATTENTION AND DISTRACTION
Attention is focused awareness. Bare attention is attention on here-and-now events. It involves two elements: an ability to concentrate – to focus my attention where I want it – and an attentiveness to what is happening in the moment.
Zen masters speak of one-pointed attention – focusing on just one thing at a time. For instance, when I watch a sunset, I’m just watching the sunset, not doing anything else. Our ordinary consciousness, however, is many pointed. As I watch the sunset, my attention darts back and forth between first this thought and then that one. Indeed, most of my attention may go into mental processes that keep me out of my here-and-now sunset.
Gestalt psychologists speak of the figure-ground phenomenon. I can drive down a street many times and never notice a certain mailbox. It’s just part of the background or “ground” against which other things stand out. But suppose I want to mail a letter. Now the mailbox leaps out at me. Suddenly it is the “figure,” and everything else become the “ground.”
Interest and Attention
What I’m aware of depends not only on what’s happening, but also on what I choose to pay attention to. Perls comments, “The pictures or sounds of the world do not enter us automatically, but selectively. We don’t see; we look for, search, scan for something. We don’t hear all the sounds of the world, we listen.”
I’m likely to become fragmented and out of touch with myself if I habitually respond to the stimuli that bid for my attention, instead of listening and searching. I stay more centered and more in touch with my aliveness when I actively choose what I attend to. My interest creates the meaning I find in a situation.
Distraction
I want to feel free to ask you to repeat what you said if I didn’t quite understand it. And I want you to ask me to rephrase if you didn’t hear what I said. If we agree on these two things, we’ll hear each other ore often.
Attention in Everyday Tasks
In his intriguing book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1976), Robert M. Pirsig describes how several principles of awareness and attention can be applied to exacting, demanding jobs.
First, assume an attitude of modesty. The higher your opinion of yourself, Pirsig says, the less likely you are to admit that you’ve goofed on something and the more likely you are to ignore facts that turn up.”
Pirsig’s second principle is for those whose anxiety stops them from getting started. Read ever book and magazine you can about how to do the repair job, he suggests. “Remember, too, that you’re after peace of mind – not just a fixed machine. And think the job through before you start to work: You can save time and trouble later by listing everything you’re going to do on little slips of paper and then reorganizing the sequence as you think about the job.
The third principle is: When you’re bored, stop. Boredom means your mind is wandering elsewhere. That’s when we make mistakes.
Pirsig’s fourth principle – Impatience is a great cause of mistakes. One cause of impatience is underestimating how long the job will take. Pirsig’s solution is to allow an indefinite time for the job and to double the allotted time when circumstances force time planning.
A fifth Pirsig principle is that “overall goals must be scaled down in importance and immediate goals must be scaled up.”
Finally, the sixth useful Pirsig principle is called “mechanic’s feel.” Mechanic’s feels involves attending carefully to the material I’m working with – its softness or hardness, its elasticity, and what it tells me about how it wants to be handled.
Boredom
Boredom is a de-energizing of my attention. It can function as a useful statement about what I’m doing. It can identify something I don’t want to hear. In any event, it can be a way I torture myself and deaden my life.
I most often feel bored when I try to pay attention to something that doesn’t interest me right then. My options may include finding something interesting in it, changing what’s happening, drifting off into my own world of thoughts and fantasies, or leaving. I don’t have to poison myself by staying bored.
That “poison” can be real and deadly. For instance, you’ve probably known old people who died not long after retiring, or who died shortly after their spouses. Others in similar situations find interests that nourish and sustain them.
When you and I are talking, if I’m not interested in what’s happening, I can change it. I do you no favor by pretending that I”m interested in what you’re saying when I”m not. That poisons us both. When I”m listening because I think I “should,” I feel dead or resentful, and you and I make little contact.
As I develop my ability to be interested in wherever I am and whomever I’m with, I’m less at the mercy of circumstances and I have less need to be “entertained.”
EMPTINESS
Our capacity to be aware is hindered if our minds are too full.
Our culture encourages us to be too busy – to fill our consciousness with as many things and activities as we can. Space that isn’t filled with things and time that isn’t filled with action can seem threatening.
Sometimes people in counseling report sensing a sort of frightening black hole or deep pit inside them. So they grab for whatever they can, hanging on desperately so they won’t “fall in.”
Fritz Perls encouraged people who experience such feelings to let go – to go ahead and plunge into the darkness, being attentive to what they observe and feel. Again and again people find that when they get past their panic, they attain a valuable experience of their interior worlds. Perls spoke of the emptiness that we sometimes so fear as a fertile void that hold important keys to change.
There may be times when you feel the kind of frustrated emptiness in which nothing seems to have much meaning, and you get an uneasy feeling of something wrong because you lack defined activity or direction. At such times we need to remember that a pause in a person’s life is seldom an accident. It can be a time of many possibilities. When you nothing to do is a good time to do your nothing.
The Happy President 