Awareness is a gift we give ourselves.  It is a choice.  We can become self-aware, we can become mindfully aware, or we can remain asleep.

Why is awareness a gift?  Because it is from awareness, not only of self but of the universe, our place in it and how it responds to us, that brings us into enlightenment. 

There can be no enlightenment without awareness.  You can possess great knowledge of universal principles but without an awareness of your place your actions your existence within that universal framework, there is no enlightenment.

Universal principles mean little without our participation.

The hardest thing for man is make the choice to be aware.  With awareness comes responsibility.  In awareness is power, in awareness is connection, in awareness is God, self and soul all mixed into an interesting soup.

Part of awareness is to understand the part you play in this soup, in this interaction.

Does life exist without awareness of it – can you exist without choosing awareness? 

Well, you can leave part of this question to the physicists but yes, you can choose to engage in your life without awareness.

Without awareness, life is viewed as:

Reactive vs. proactive

Victim rather than power

Blame rather than responsibility

Value is placed on the external – the big lie, rather than the internal.

In summation, without awareness, you do not claim your power, you chose to abdicate your power and your responsibility.  You blame others and situations for the state of your life.  Life becomes a series of reactions rather than actively choosing and participating in creating the life you choose.

Without awareness, you experience life with the sense that someone else holds all the answers for you – you feel as if only you had the key, you could unlock the secrets to your life.  If only I could figure life out.  There is a feeling of hopelessness.  A feeling of this is as good as it is going to get so I might as well get used to it.  (Can you feel this if you have no awareness?  Yes because awareness is a natural state – when you live in opposition to a natural state you are going to feel something, there will be a reverberation.)

You could experience great frustration, anger, depression.

Awareness is a natural state – look back to ancient man – so in tuned with is environment and his place within it.  A few weeks ago, a little boy was lost in one of the local forests in the Los Angeles area.  A ranger interviewed on the news stated that the ranger service was attempting to track the boy, but that tracking was a painfully slow process.  And it occurred to me that 100 years ago, there were men and women that could track people and animals with grace and ease.  It is not that tracking is a slow process, the truth is that we, in our civilization, have lost the knowledge of tracking.  That knowledge does not exist so readily in the minds and talents of man today. It is an awareness we have chosen not to have anymore.

Therefore awareness can be selective. 

So what knowledge about yourself have you lost, have you forgotten, have you chosen not to see.

A while back, I had the interesting experience of meeting someone, a man about seven years my junior who for the most part, lived the exact same life as myself.  We had the exact same struggles, the exact same journey, it was truly freaky.  It was like looking in a mirror, a fun house mirror because the images seemed distorted.  He carried the pain from his life experiences like a monk’s cloak around his shoulders, heavy, coarse and impenetrable.  And I wondered, oh Lord is that me.  And maybe when I feel threatened, yes that could be me.  But for the most part, I no longer carry my pain.  I healed it or gave it away.  The only way I could do that is by being aware of the pain and realizing, again awareness, that no matter the ‘cause’ of the pain, it is my choice what to do with it.  And as my awareness grew, it became clear that I could choose my experiences of pain as well. 

Awareness is a gift from God, it is a talent we all possess.  Awareness is the tool you have to process life, you place in it, and your power to actively create the experiences of your choosing.

Inner Peace & Blessings,

Rebecca Le Vine
Inner Peace Coach & Trainer

Copyright 2005 Rebecca Le Vine