What is awareness? – #74

I just love Scott Forrester’s book The Aware Athlete! I open it every week to find inspiration. Here’s my most recent find:

“Awareness is the highest level of human functioning.”

This sentence is a concise summary of what I’ve learned from psychoanalysis: You have to increase your level of awareness if you want to discern deeper levels of meaning.The belief that the past is in the present, an idea from Freud a prime mover of psychoanalytic thinking, is not immediately apparent. 

Perhaps increasing our level of awareness is difficult because we forget the unconscious is alive. I can’t say exactly how these other layers we are gifted with interfere with awareness but I’ve learned through experience that there is more going on than we consciously know. I’ll be attempting to explain this in my memoir. 

Not only is the unconscious active, it communicates with systems in the body. We don’t know exactly how it does this but if you ask me, it does. I would add this happens mostly in ways of which we are not aware.  We have to raise our level of awareness in order to get to the deeper levels to find meaning in life.

If you have questions about awareness, let me know. I probably won’t be able to answer but I’ll love knowing I am not alone with questions! Email or comment.

CLUE: You probably have layers in your freezer. This week, search around – if you live where I do it won’t be much colder than stepping outside – and find the oldest container and throw it away. Feel happy! Relieved! You did something to clean up your life. If you think of it, let me know what you pitched!

Thanks for exploring the mystery – Nicky Mendenhall

Image: The Guardian is again in hibernation.