Dear Rabbeinu,
Re:Self-Awareness
"When each thought absorbs your attention completely, it means you identify with the voice in your head. Thought then becomes invested with a sense of self. This is the ego, a mind-made "me." That mentally constructed self feels incomplete and precarious. That’s why fearing and wanting are its predominant emotions and motivating forces.
When you recognize that there is a voice in your head that pretends to be you and never stops speaking, you are awakening out of your unconscious identification with the stream of thinking. When you notice that voice, you realize that who you are is not the voice — the thinker — but the one who is aware of it.
Knowing yourself as the awareness behind the voice is freedom."
This is so amazing but time constraints allow me not to elaborate.
When you recognize that there is a voice in your head that pretends to be you and never stops speaking, you are awakening out of your unconscious identification with the stream of thinking. When you notice that voice, you realize that who you are is not the voice — the thinker — but the one who is aware of it.
Knowing yourself as the awareness behind the voice is freedom."
This is so amazing but time constraints allow me not to elaborate.
Sounds interesting, can you explain???
My answer:
In short, this is what I think:
We are all locked into a certain way of thinking, feeling and seeing the world. We identify our feelings with who we are and are frustrated.
Example: A person is annoyed by his wife because she is critical of him. He THINKS that she is absolutely wrong and fights fire with fire.
And the Satan dances with joy.
To be self aware is to understand why I am bothered when my wife criticizes me, to understand her motivations, to question what I do to trigger the criticism , to consider different modus operandi [method of operations] in receiving the criticism and mostly in understanding that there is no OBJECTIVE reason to be upset but a purely SUBJECTIVE one that I have locked myself into since childhood.
Example 2: I don't get pshat in the gemara and get down on myself. Self awareness means that I understand that my feelings have ZERO to do with the gemara and EVERYTHING to do with my fundamentally errant way of seeing the world, life and primarily myself. Do I value myself even if I don't "chap pshat". Do I feel Hashem's love? My own self-love? The love of those around me? Do I appreciate that I have many other middos unrelated to whether yeush she-lo mi-daas is or isn't yeush and how one can have yeush before he actually has yeush [shittas Rava].
Self awareness means to step outside yourself as a dispassionate observer and understand why you feel the way you do and FIX your inbred way of being to something more healthy.
Make sense???
Thanks for asking:)
באהבה רבה
Me
