Articles

The Dance of Awareness

by Bill Harris, Director, Centerpointe Research Institute

My friend Ken Wilber likes to say, "Awareness, in and of itself, is transformative." What does this mean, though? And what is awareness?

I have found that most people don't really know what spiritual teachers mean by "awareness", and this term is thrown around without any clear definition. Awareness is more than just "knowing" something. You might, for instance, know that from time to time you have certain dysfunctional emotional reactions that keep you from being happy, peaceful, and successful in the way you would like. This knowledge, however, does not keep you from repeating these emotional reactions.

Biting into the strawberry of awareness...

Your internal map of reality, for those of you who are new to my writing, contains such things as your beliefs, values, internal strategies, ways you have of filtering information as it comes in, along with ways you have of sorting it, storing it, remembering, and retrieving it, as well as internal strategies for making decisions, along with the decisions themselves. All of these things operate unconsciously, outside our awareness, to create our experience of life. Since we don't choose how this map is structured (it pretty much happens to us as we grow up, as a result of all our experiences), it might give us the exact experience of life we want, but usually a fair amount--and in some people, a lot--of what it creates is what we don't want.

The process of becoming conscious of all of this material allows us to discover how we are creating what is happening in our lives, and to make conscious choices of how to do it in such a way that we create what we want, instead of whatever was planted in our minds by past experiences.

by Bill Harris, Director Centerpointe Reasearch Institute

This may be the most important article I've ever written for Mind Chatter. I'm going to write about something I've been thinking about sharing with you for some time now, but have been waiting for "the right moment" to do so. This seems like the right moment, and when I saw Marc Gilson's review of Chogyam Trunpa's "The Myth of Freedom" I knew I was right about this. Please do read this book review, as it also speaks about the ability of the conscious person to realize that the negative side of things is not to be resisted, but at the same time, you don't have to get sucked into it, either.

You'll see what I mean by this in a moment.

The reason I've waited to share this is that it may be sensitive or controversial information for some people. If that is true for you, I urge you to read very carefully and be sure to get my point, since I can see a possibility for misunderstanding.

Another new year begins! This is traditionally a time when we reflect on the past year, and make resolutions for the coming year. You probably know that most new Year's resolutions are never kept, and there's a reason for that. For that reason, I thought I'd discuss what you can do to actually create resolutions that really happen.

I've found that the key to any "resolution" is a decision. You have to DECIDE you're going to do something. You don't TRY to do something, you don't SEE IF YOU MIGHT be able to do something, you don't WONDER IF you can do something. To successfully make a change, you have to DECIDE to do it.