Self-Awareness and Meditation

At the present time, self-awareness is very hard to develop. One day the process will be standardised so that it can be taught in schools. But I feel that that is still a long way off. I suppose that it is the same for any subject. After all, atomic physics is now taught in secondary schools, only a mere 100 years after it was frontier thinking. Until self-awareness is taught in schools, it will still be, for adults, mainly reactive rather than proactive – it will be developed from necessity rather than from choice.

Self-awareness usually develops as a response to failure, together with a lack of social support. "Why didn't things go the way I expected them to go ?".  "Why couldn't I do what I wanted to do?".  Failure can prompt the analysis of ourself, in order to discover why we failed. Social support often eases the sense of failure and so prevents self-analysis. Effective analysis needs to be systematic and not casual or random if we are to get worthwhile results. If we add a suitable method to self-analysis (so we don't rely on imagination) then we can develop self-awareness.

Our pursuit of our goals depends on our drive, which means whether we are energised by external criteria, external aims, or by inner criteria such as the desire for personal development. We channel our drive into our ideals.  Failure can have the effect of making our internal drive more important than any external drive.

The development of self-awareness affects the intensity of this process of channelling our drive. Self-awareness reveals limitations to our ideals. If we can circumvent those limitations, then we can handle our drive with the same intensity as before. If we cannot handle the limitations, then we scale down the drive to an intensity that we can handle. Hence we adjust our drive so that we can master its use – we have to learn to handle failure as much as we learn to handle success.

Self-awareness and Self-consciousness

It is easily possible to be self-conscious without having much self-awareness. For example, this is the position of rational thinkers who deny that the subconscious mind exists.

Each person has two sides to himself: his orientation to other people, and his orientation to himself. The first orientation is his social identity, or how he sees himself within his relationships, whether social, sexual, political, or religious. The other orientation is his individual identity, or how he sees his sense of individuality, either as a traditional ego or as a new-age one.

Self-awareness develops partly through the interactions with others, but also partly through the analysis of self. In other words, interaction with others develops awareness of our social identity, and contemplation on oneself develops awareness of our individuality (or individual identity).

If there was no subconscious mind and unconscious mind, then self-awareness would be equivalent to self-consciousness. (So in the state of pure individuality, self-consciousness would be of the self alone). The subconscious mind develops because the person has little awareness of the negative ways in which he interacts with others. When things go wrong in his relationships he usually prefers to forget and start again, rather than learning from his mistakes; hence his limitations and inadequacies become buried in the subconscious mind. 

The negativity within the subconscious mind needs to be controlled. Therefore, in order to achieve this, consciousness has to develop through two centres : self-consciousness and self-awareness.

Meditation

There is another factor to the development of self-awareness. Buddhist meditation develops self-awareness to some degree, but it leaves untouched any issues of motivation.

Motivation usually involves the person's social relationships. Buddhist meditation detaches the observer from what he is observing. Whereas to investigate motivation the person has to identify with what he is observing (how he is reacting to his social relationships). This is done best in ordinary life, rather than meditating in solitude.

The limitation of meditational self-observation is that it does not go very deep into the core of a person. It will not penetrate the defensiveness that a person throws up as a shield against the pain of life. To penetrate this shield, the person has first to bring to the surface his psychological stratagems by identifying with them. As he lives his social relationships, so he lives his patterns of identifications. As he confronts his limitations to social success, so his level of anxiety remains high; as he withdraws temporarily from relationships into solitude, his level of anxiety drops. The level of anxiety is the key to developing self-awareness  – the higher the anxiety, the easier it is to explore oneself.  Therefore, by using self-observation to analyse his social relationships during his acts of relating, he can go deeper into himself than he can by relegating self-observation to times of meditational solitude.

Meditation has always been used as a means to focus concentration, but it is only of moderate help for psychological problems.

To express these ideas in another way : meditational practice can analyse, to some degree, the individual identity of the meditator. But it cannot effectively analyse his social identity.

The prime usefulness of meditation is for mood control, as in the Buddhist practice of mindfulness. The practice of mindfulness enables the person to watch his moods arise and then eventually fade away. This reduces the intensity of the moods.

The important thing to understand is that meditation is best used for management of problems ; no form of meditation can solve deep psychological problems since the causes of such problems are hardly ever revealed by this approach.

Therefore, ability in meditation alone is not sufficient for healing the psychological wounds from the past. There is no substitute for psycho-therapy.

Copyright @2003  Ian Heath
All Rights Reserved

The copyright is mine and the articles are free to use. They can be reproduced anywhere, so long as the source is acknowledged.