More on self awareness

 

The art of shifting our focus from what is happening outside to what is happening inside of us is self awareness. Within us we find thoughts, emotions and physical sensations. For example if I can become aware of my fear fully in a fearful situation I am self aware. Most of us tend to shut out our fear and lash out at the situation causing our fear or we try to run away from it. Another example is to wait till we feel quite hungry before we eat. Then we can stop eating the moment our hunger disappears, even if we had just had only one mouthful. Trying to be aware of the emotional triggers for every action within us is a good way of becoming self aware

Divine grace necessary to suceed

Self-awareness can only reach the Ultimate Self provided it is helped by that message from the Divine Intellect which is called 'revelation' or tradition in its universal sense. 

The gates through which the Spirit has

descended to the level of the human self are hermetically sealed and protected by the dragons which cannot be subdued save with the help of the angelic forces. 

Self-awareness in the sense of experimenting with the boundaries of the psyche, with new experiences, with the heights and depths of the psychological world, does not result in any way in moving closer to the proximity of the Self.

The attempted expansion ofawareness in this sense ,

which is so common among modern man anxious to break the boundaries of the prison of the materialistic world he has created for himself, results only in a horizontal expansion, but not in a vertical one. 

Its result is a never ending wandering in the labyrinth of the psychic world and not the end of all wandering in the presence of the Sun which alone is.Only the sacred can enable the awareness of the self to expand in the direction of the Self. 

The Divine reveals to man his Sacred Name as a holy vessel which carries man from the limited world of his self to the shores of the World of the Spirit where alone man is his Real Self. 

That is why the   Sufi, Mansuir al-Hallaj, through whom the Self uttered 'I am the Truth' (ana'l Iaqq) prays in this famous verse to the Self to remove the veil which separates man's illusory I from the Self who alone is I in the absolute sense. '

“Between me and thee, it ismy "I-ness "which is in contention; Through Thy grace remove my "I-ness" from between us.”

the perfection of the self implies first of all the negation of itself, a death which is also a rebirth, for only he who has realized that he is nothing is able to enter unto the Divine Presence. The only thing man can offer in sacrifice to God is his self, and in performing this sacrifice through spiritual practice he returns the self to the Self and gains awareness of the real 'I' within, who alone has the right to claim 'I am'. 

As Rumi has said

in these celebrated and often quoted verses concerning the real 'I' 

I died as mineral and became a plant, I died as plant and rose to animal,

I died as animal and I was Man.

Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?

Yet once more I shall die asMan, to soar With angels blest; but even from angelhood

Imust pass on: all except God doth perish. When I have sacrificed my angel-soul,

I shall become what no mind e'er conceived. Oh, letme not exist! forNon-existence

Proclaims in organ tones: "To him we shall return".