How is self-awareness practiced?

Answer 1

purified mind freed from desire ,intense concentration to steady the thought waves until there is one continuous thought ( om) which then becomes meditation on om ,this leads to nirvana (super conscious state ,enlightenment) the knowledge that the individual soul is identical to the supreme soul is now experienced, like a stream entering the sea, they become one. this is the highest yoga

Answer 2

To put it as simply as possible here is an example... When you are having a discussion / debate or any verbal communication with another person you step away from yourself mentally and view yourself as a third person. So you might be able to see just how you handle the situation.

Doing this in real time is not easy but not impossible. Once mastered you can do it in any situation you find yourself.

So basically you are always watching yourself! ;-)

Others here answer what being self aware is like and the experience of it and that is very very cool thing to be. But I must say putting it into practice... that is the next step.

Answer 3

I am only an observer and not the observed. The observer is a witness.

The witnessed is me but not the real ‘I’. Suffering exists in me and not in the real ‘I’. This is an important enquiry in Indian philosophy. The body is witnessed… so the witnessor is different from the witnessed. The mind is observed and the observer is different from the observed. Feelings are observed and the observer is the real ‘I’. So who am I? I am only an observer and to observe I must be consciousness, the awareness. This awareness has no form. If it were to have a form, it can be observed and anything that is observed is an object of perception. The subject is the real ‘I’. So the real ‘I’ has no form and hence it is formless. That which is formless cannot be destroyed. Hence, Indian mystics say the self is indestructible. This has to be experienced and can not be intellectually grasped.

Answer 4

meditation is a good way.. i've been practicing it till now... just sit and observe how the mind is really naughty !
you can practice concentration... and then awareness step by step.. you can start by concentrating on your body (such as breathe), then the mind, the mind-object.. then you'll gain awareness slowly..

Answer 5

The best way is to know what is normal, what is normally acceptable and what is not, then you'll be able to differentiate everything from abnormality. That way you'll be able to separate what should be and what should be not and zoom away.

Answer 6

Navel gazing?

Answer 7

TAI CHI .CHI GUNG.BREATHING EXERCISES

Answer 8

BUBBA: While you are alive, everything seems important. Even despair is important, an acknowledgment that something important to you has not happened. Thus, life, while you live it, is full of importances. On the other hand, the entire universe conspires to make you surrender what seems important, because everything in the universe comes to an end. All experience is conspiring to move you to transcend experience while at the same time demanding that you fulfill experience. Every instant of your life contains both of these urges.

Life is completely absurd. Every particle of it would move you toward some experience or other, and yet all experience conceals the ultimate message of the necessity for transcendence or freedom from experience. That one must attain freedom from something that is unnecessary to begin with is utterly absurd. Why bother with it to begin with?

Enlightenment is to Awaken from the seriousness of experience. It is not to despair or to destroy oneself. Despair is serious, and so is suicide. Self-indulgence is serious, stressful effort is serious, discipline is serious, interest is serious, knowledge is serious, death, sex, food, everything is completely serious. This movement or tendency to survive, to continue in independent form, is profoundly serious, and it is also absurd because it must be transcended. Enlightenment is to be restored to Divine humor, to realize that nothing is necessary. No experience is necessary. You can either become distracted by experience and repeat it, or you can transcend it. One or the other. If you have transcended experience, then it is no longer necessary. In that case, whether or not experience continues makes not the slightest bit of difference to you. Experience will come to an end with death in any case.

We are under the incredibly absurd illusion that there is an objective world "outside" Consciousness. There is not a shred of truth in this presumption. There is no world independent of Consciousness. The world is a modification of Consciousness, a play on Consciousness. It has no independent reality and no necessity. It is just possibility. What Consciousness does in terms of possibility in any moment is the drama of the seriousness of existence. When it Awakens to its true Position, which is senior to phenomena, then it is full of humor and there is no necessity to any experience. There is only Enlightenment, Divine Freedom.

You are constantly imagining that you are experiencing objective things, but you are not. You do not actually see an object-that lamp over there, for instance. It is not the object you are seeing. Isn't it obvious to you that you are experiencing a phenomenon of the brain? You cannot see the lamp. You are not inside your head looking out at the lamp. A bizarre phenomenon of the brain produces the sensation that there is a lamp over there. Where is it anyway? A reflected image twists around in the eyeball, and nerve impulses and electrical currents flash around the meat brain in order to construct an illusion, a sensation, an idea. What is objective about it? It is just your own fascination. It is your own mind. It is your own Consciousness, modified by organs of experience. It is mind. It is harmless enough in itself, really, but you are so distracted by it that you have lost your humor. You have lost your true position. You do not have a right relationship to experience.

The right relationship to all experience is to exist as the Transcendental Consciousness, the Radiant Reality Itself, in which phenomena arise without necessity, humorously. The wrong relationship to experiential phenomena is to presume that you are a separate person, a separate consciousness, in the midst of a world that you know nothing about, that somehow encloses you, that is objective to you, that is separate from you. In that case, you see, experience is a very serious business. You have no option but to submit to it, to be distracted and tormented by it.

Spiritual life is simply the Enlightened life. There really is no spiritual life until Enlightenment, or the seventh stage of life. All the stages of life before then are stages of experience wherein, as a discipline, we bring the Intuition of the Truth to experience, thereby transcending that level of experience. We engage this process stage by stage, practicing this Transcendental discipline relative to the many qualities of experience until all possible experience is transcended. Only then have we resumed the Transcendental Position, and only then can we live the Enlightened Life. Existence is spiritual only when lived from the point of view of Enlightenment. Previous to the Awakening of that Disposition, existence is not spiritual in the truest sense. It is simply a struggle with the impulse of experience, the humorlessness of experience, the motive to survive as this moment with all of its parts and implications and motives.

The motive to continue, the motive to fulfill desire, the motive to remain self-conscious, to remain yourself, to remain embodied, is basic to your sense of existence. Surviving as experience is what you are chronically doing, you see. You are not existing as the Transcendental Reality. You are just being this body-mind. You are moved to continue as that, and to glamorize it, and to have as much pleasure as possible while being the body-mind. Consequently, if you can temporarily manage to acquire a great deal of pleasure as this body-mind, you begin to think that pleasure itself is Enlightenment! As soon as you get a little physical or emotional or mental pleasure, right away you think that you are existing in the highest state that one can realize. But in true Enlightenment there is no struggle whatsoever for the continuation of phenomena. There is no fundamental or binding effort to make phenomena continue. There simply are phenomena, these conventions of experience, but they are unnecessary, temporary, harmless modifications of Consciousness. That Consciousness, Realized in Enlightenment, is not an independent person. It is without qualification, Transcendental. It is Enlightenment. The Enlightened individual is no longer fitted to the separate soul-consciousness, the individuated self struggling to survive as itself or to become something else. In Enlightenment, the motive to survival dissolves. Continued bodily existence is spontaneous, no longer dependent upon a psychological motive to continue. It simply continues, and then at some point bodily existence also simply comes to an end. It is neither necessary nor ultimate.

Likewise, the universe is not ultimate. It does not hide a great Fact. It is perfectly ordinary and unnecessary. We could just as well be having any one of an infinite number of other possible experienceless at this moment. It happens that this one is arising, but anything else could also arise. However, you are determined that this experience continue to arise more or less exactly as it is now arising. If you could relax that demand just a little bit, something entirely different would happen. But you are afraid of something entirely different. You are afraid to die. You are afraid to allow things to change. Therefore, you hold on to your present experience. But if you could give up everything, not through negative, reactive effort, but through Transcendental Realization, then your humor would be restored, and a different sense of existence would quite spontaneously arise. Then you would realize that there is no necessity to this present experience, except that it is set in motion through ordinary causation and will therefore continue for its term.

We are not present in our experience. In other words, acting, or experiencing, is not a present activity. It has nothing to do with the present, the absolute Moment of Existence. It is the past. All experience is the past. There is nothing new, and there is nothing real about the mind that experiences. The mind is simply memory, past association. It is not perceptive, nor truly sensitive to anything. It is just the mechanical record of patterns. The body is exactly the same as the mind, but because we think so much, we imagine that the mind is something different from the body. Actually, the body-mind is one, a simultaneous coincidence. Just as the mind is past associations, the body is past associations.

The body is the past. It is like a star-the rays of light that we now see were generated light years before now. The present form of that star is not visible, because it is so far away that the light it generates today takes eons to arrive. Likewise, these bodies are the reflections of the distant past. They have no present significance. They must be transcended before we can Realize the Present, or the Transcendental Reality.

Such a Realization, however, occurs only in the seventh stage of life. Many people read and think about spiritual teachings and their minds prattle the traditional ideas to the point that they think they are already Enlightened. Yet they have never become the bodily Sacrifice that is essential for this Realization. Enlightenment, or the Realization of God, is not just a conceptual understanding. It is not just a relatively calm state of mind. Enlightenment is an absolute Condition of existence that literally transcends the body-mind. It is not just an idea the body-mind has that makes it feel better. From the radical, Enlightened point of view, there is no body-mind! Thus, in order to enter into the seventh stage of life, one must pass through the most profound and even terrifying transformation. That event cannot be casually created by a little thinking. One must come to the point where there is literally no necessity to the body-mind, to the psyche, or to experience.

Countless silly people think that they are Enlightened when, at best, they feel good today. That mediocre sense of pleasure is not Enlightenment. Enlightenment involves no thinking whatsoever. There is no rational justification for Enlightenment, no logical sequence of thought that leads to it. Enlightenment is a spontaneous, absolute, transcendental Awakening that is free of all the seriousness and necessity of bodily and mental existence. Therefore, death, the cessation of experience, the cessation of states of mind, the cessation of the body, the cessation of the world, is no longer a threat. So much the worse for it! There is complete freedom from the implications of all that dreadful destiny that everyone fears so profoundly. The Enlightened being is not at all threatened by all of that. He is laughing. He is free.

But one must pay the price for this Freedom. It is not simply an attitude toward the world that one enjoys from some conventional position of separation. There is the Radiant Transcendental Consciousness, the Absolute Divine Reality. That truly is Existence, and It must be Realized if Enlightenment is to be true. In that Realization, the Divine Person is tacitly obvious, as concrete as any object that you now associate with bodily life and experience. Once this Realization is Awake, there is no necessity to the phenomena of experience. They simply continue in this moment, but they have no power to deceive.

All the stages of life leading up to the seventh stage are stages of distraction by the seriousness of one or another kind of experience. The process of the transcendence of experience begins at the lowest level, where experience involves the fear of loss of the body and the profound connection to food, and the craving for sexual self-indulgence. These experiences characterize the ordinary person, the lowest kind of person in the spectrum of existence. Yogis, mystics, and saints all cling mightily to experiential inwardness, visions, flashing lights in the brain, vibrations in the middle of the head, exotic, many-armed works of art that they create in imagination, infinite peacefulness without a single thought, or even seeing and thinking nothing and having no experience at all. But these are all, high and low, merely the possibilities of human beings in the first six stages of life.

In the Way of Divine Ignorance, what makes these possibilities spiritually significant is that in each stage of life, in the midst of each stage of distracting experience, whether high or low, we must realize self-transcendence and whole body surrender into the Radiant Transcendental Consciousness, or Divine Person. Apart from such self-transcendence, however, the first six stages of mere maturing in the structural possibilities of Man are absurd, humorless, fundamentally very serious. Something in each of the first six stages is taken profoundly seriously by ordinary human beings. The body and food, sex, thinking, psychic awareness, higher mental hallucinations, even blissful, internal silence-there appears to be something profoundly serious and meaningful to one's hallucinated existence in each of those stages.

But the seventh stage, the Enlightened stage, is not serious at all. In that stage we Realize our native Transcendence of everything. There is the tacit Realization that there is nothing serious whatsoever about experiential existence. It could end in this moment, casually, and that cessation in itself would not have the slightest significance. Or, it could continue for infinite eons of time, through infinite permutations and transformations of experience, and its continuing would not have any significance either. That is the Disposition in Enlightenment-Realization of the non-necessity of everything. Absolutely nothing is of serious consequence or of ultimate necessity-absolutely nothing.

The ordinary reactive personality, who is basically in despair and hysterical, can also say that life is meaningless, but such a person is very serious. The Enlightened man, however, Realizes total Freedom. He is no longer serious, but neither is he self-destructive. He has passed into Ecstasy. He has not suppressed or separated from himself-rather, all that he is has been transcended in the Radiant Transcendental Consciousness. Thus, he is full of humor and delight. He is not aggressively opposed to the world, nor is he clinging to it. All the tension in his heart has been re-leased. To speak of Enlightenment without that sign is nonsense. There is no Enlightenment without the release of the heart from all of its seriousness, all of its clinging to phenomena, high and low.

From the point of view of Enlightenment, even mystical phenomena are nonsense. They are not serious. They are hallucinations, brain phenomena, psychism, permutations of your own body-mind. They are just more of your seriousness. They have no necessity and they are not the source of Bliss. Whether they are higher phenomena, viewed from the mental or subjective point of view, or lower phenomena, viewed essentially from the bodily point of view, all phenomena are serious and unnecessary. They do not bring happiness, fundamentally. Happiness is inherent in the Radiant Transcendental Consciousness. When that Reality is Realized, its inherent Bliss is obvious, and phenomena are seen not to contain any independent Life or Consciousness, nor to grant Freedom or Bliss. From the Enlightened point of view, all phenomena are simply the theatre of Eternal Blissfulness, a theatre that may or may not continue.