The problem of awareness

If you identify solely with your actions, you are falsely perceiving the truth about yourself. You are judging, limiting, and even rejecting yourself without justification.

Low self-confidence is simply a problem of Awareness. Once you are aware of the Truth about your­self, you will be able to understand why you are the way you are and, most importantly, learn to love and accept yourself.

Dr Robert Anthony defines your Awareness as the clarity with which you consciously and unconsciously perceive and understand everything that affects your life. “It is the sum total of your life experiences, encompassing conditioning, knowl­edge, intellect, intuition, instincts and all that you perceive through your five senses. Your present level of Awareness indicates your moods, attitudes, emotional reac­tions, prejudices, habits, desires, anxieties, fears, aspirations and goals. Most important, it indicates your sense of personal worth; in other words, how feel about yourself.”

Awareness also determines your concept of reality. Your mind is like a camera that is constantly tak­ing pictures of the events in your life. You are the one who decides what kinds of scenes you wish to record on film and these things make up your Awareness. You may read newspapers, watch TV or concentrate on other sources of dramatized tragedy, sickness or poverty, all of which are absorbed or mentally recorded. As you focus and file, focus and file, you even­tually accept these things as reality, because you have the pictures to prove it.

The problem is that truth and reality are not necessarily the same. If your mind has accepted false concepts, values and beliefs about yourself and others, your Aware­ness will be distorted. Although you will be operating from the wrong viewpoint, it will seem like the truth and you will take on the personality and behavior patterns to justify it. “Every decision you make and every action you take is based on your present level of awareness.”

You always do your best

Does this statement surprise you? Most people are shocked when they first hear it. You have been told for years that you can and should be “better”. And while this is basically good advice, if it is to be acted upon, it must be considered in the context of what constitutes your present level of Awareness.

The fact is that you can never do better than you are doing at this moment because you are limited by your present level of Awareness. “To know better is not sufficient to do better.” You will only “do better” when your present level of Awareness has changed.

It is imperative for you to recog­nise that you will be happy and at peace with yourself only to the de­gree you accept you are doing your best at the moment. Once you do, you will no longer be vulnerable to the adverse opinions of others.

Accepting reality

You must learn to accept the reality of the moment and realize that no other action is possible at the time.

Reality is the same for everyone. The difference between yours and someone else’s is your perception of it. No two people have the same awareness. No two people have the same background and experiences and so their way of perceiving life, their values, concepts, beliefs, assumptions and aspirations will be different.

The personal reality of each one of us consists of the mental, emotional and physical charac­teristics we cannot change at this given moment. Your personal reality, then, is the sum total of your present level of awareness, values, beliefs and concepts – right or wrong – that you embrace right now. As perception is always col­ored and influenced by awareness, if your awareness is faulty, so is your perception – even if you are sure you are right.

Note that practically all your emotional and most of your physical problems are the result of resisting your own or someone else’s reality, or the reality of a situation that, at the moment, you are unable but desperately want to change. Your refusal or inability to accept things as they are is at the root of the problem. We resist reality, or “what is,” because we are under the false and destructive assumption that we can change it. But things are the way they are in the present moment whether we want to accept that fact or not.

The key to change is to accept other people’s behaviour without feeling that you have “to set them right.” You must allow them the personal freedom to live according to their own individual Awareness, however distorted and faulty it may be. To do this, you must learn to love and accept yourself first. If you are still judging yourself, you will feel compelled to judge others, thereby resisting their reality and present level of Awareness. “You can only be compassionate and understanding of others to the degree that you are compassionate and understanding of yourself.”

If you are not conscious that you are resisting reality, there is no way for you to break this destructive habit. You will believe that people and circumstances are conspiring against you because you refuse to face up to WHAT IS. And so you live in a world of wish­ful thinking where things “should be” but are not, a certain way.

It is a demonstrated fact of life that what happens to you is not nearly as important as the degree of intensity with which you resist the reality of a particular situation or individual. To put it another way, you cannot help the way you feel about things, but you can help the way you think and react to them. You may not like the reality of a situation, but you must accept it for the present moment. In so doing, you will have control over your actions and reactions.

The destructive power of val­ue-judging

The basic cause of most inhar­monious human relationships is the tendency to impose our values on other people. We want them to live by what we have decided is “right,” “fair,” “good,” etc. If they do not conform, we become re­sentful and angry, not recognizing that their level of Awareness makes them unable to comply.

By now, you must realise that there is nothing we can do to alter people’s values, concepts or beliefs if their Awareness is not ready to accept change. No one is obligated to change just to make the world a better place for YOU to live in. People may disturb or anger you, but the fact that not everyone objects to their behaviour indicates that the problem is not theirs, but yours. You are resisting THEIR REALITY and desiring to see things, not as they are, but as you would like them to be. This is the point at which you start value judging.

Your motivation to cease value-judging should encompass the knowledge that all value-judg­ments of “good and bad”, “right and wrong”, “fair and unfair” are totally unfounded because every­one must inevitably do what their present level of Awareness permits them to do – no more, no less.

Simply to avoid value judging others because you have been told that it is inappropriate is not enough. You must cease value-judging yourself first, and then you will cease value-judging others. This will allow you to start loving both yourself and others. When you learn to love and appreciate yourself, you will no longer be self-demanding and self-critical.

As soon as you start loving others as they are, others will start loving you as you are. They will not have any other choice. Think about it! Who are the people to whom you are most attracted? They are those people whom you consider your close friends, the people who, no matter what they know about you, never pass value judgments. The secret of loving and being loved is to stop value judging – forever!