How could one determine their own level of self-awareness & how would you go about increasing it
Your “Self” is everything and everyone.
Your “Self” is everyone else’s Self too.
Self is God. God is Self.
Self-awareness is awareness of The ALL — experiencing yourself as All of It. Self-awareness is awareness-awareness; or, aware of awareness; or, I AM THAT I AM.
A way to “gauge” your self awareness is to gauge the breadth and depth of your experience… or what you experience as “you.” If you experience everything as you, then you absolutely know yourself, or you are aware of all aspects of yourself.
Awareness isn’t something you increase. Awareness is something you purify.
If you’re awareness is clouded, then what you experience as you is limited to things, like your body, your mind, your thoughts, your things, your senses, etc. If your awareness is pure than those boundaries of self are removed and you experience everything as yourself. Some ways boundaries are made include language, measurements, and memory. The ego (which is a collection of memories) is another boundary. By purifying your mind, heart, body, and soul, you can become more self-aware. Also, by developing the ability to turn off memory, you’ll be able to rewire your experience from exclusive, to all-inclusive.
What would it be like to turn off your memory?
Imagine you’ve lived your whole life in a transparent box. The Box is in a field with many green, leafy trees. Every now and again, you observe the trees shaking and fluttering. Sometimes they shake really hard, sometimes barely at all, and sometimes they’re completely still.
After many years, you exit this box while the trees are shaking really hard. As you exit, you feel a strong force pushing you over. The strong force goes away, and you are no longer being pushed over. You also notice the trees aren’t shaking anymore. Then again the strong force comes and pushes you and the trees are also agitated. Then you reason, the trees aren’t moving on their own, they’re being pushed by the strong force that comes and goes.
Many years go by and you hear people call the strong force, “wind.” After some time, you decide to go back into the transparent box. Once again you observe the trees, but now, instead of them shaking, you think, “the wind is blowing.” Turning off memory is like watching the trees shake and not thinking, “the wind is blowing.” But once again, observing that sometimes the trees shake.
Memory is but a record of our labels, classifications, symbols and their meaning.
When we want to create a record of something, we label it. But everything in existence is very complex, so we must create simple labels to represent complex things. That’s where language is used. Language is using symbols to describe things. But a symbol is not the thing itself, it just represents something.
When we label things, we push it away from our experience. When we label ourselves, we alienate ourselves. When someone has a large database of labels, their awareness is obstructed, or impure. And what is experienced is only through symbols. And you can’t experience symbols. You experience what symbols represent.
So if everything that can be experienced is God, and God is experience itself, then by removing the record of labels (or by turning it off) we move closer to self-awareness which is all-inclusive experience — all knowing.
And it’s been said a lot throughout history that the reality of God cannot be described, known, or experienced through words. That the Ultimate Reality is indescribable — only experienced.
Here’s a Zen saying:
Before one studies Zen, mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after a first glimpse into the truth of Zen, mountains are no longer mountains and waters are no longer waters; after enlightenment, mountains are once again mountains and waters once again waters.
