Awakening is the process of going from being unconscious to conscious.
Being unconscious basically means being lost in your mind, thoughts and overall conditioning. Your morals and beliefs would be based on what you have learnt and picked up from others growing up. You would mistake these morals and beliefs as ones that you have chosen. The world around us conditions our minds through what we see, hear and experience. It makes us who we are, well at least who we think we are. It conditions our minds and we begin to identify with this conditioning which further cements it into our being. The more we identify with these thoughts and beliefs about who we are, the less we are able to see outside of it.
As time goes by, we get lost to this conditioning which narrows down our awareness of our true selves and boxes it into a limited perspective of life in which all that is available for us to perceive from is our own pre-existing knowledge (of our ourselves and the world around us). That is how I would define narrow-mindedness: someone who is unable to accept (or perceive) something outside of what they think or believe (their conditioning).
An example that would be easy for most people to understand would be that of a terrorist. They are so identified with their beliefs that they are willing to kill others and sometimes even themselves as a result. They are 100 percent identified with what is in their own heads. There is no room for introspection or the possibility that they could be wrong. They are unable to see outside of their own rigid beliefs.
Were they born with these beliefs? No, they learn them from their environment, society and what they were told, yet they are completely convinced by them and would defend and argue them with their (illogical) reasoning. This is unconsciousness.
I used an extreme example here so everyone would understand. We all have conditioning based on our own upbringing, the environment we grew up in and what we experienced as we were growing up. What if I had used your beliefs as an example? Would you have instantaneously defended them without introspection or questioning them at all? It is easy for us to understand how others could have deluded beliefs running their lives but it is a different story when it comes to having the awareness to really question our own.
The process of awakening is when we do just that. When our awareness begins to expand enough for us to question ourselves and the world around us. We begin to wake up from the dream (or nightmare) that our own minds had us trapped in.
Several things can cause the expansion of our awareness such as: meditation, near death experience, introspection, mental suffering and the fact that we live in such an imbalanced world where things like war, murder and savage greed have become the norm.
Meditation silences the mind and relaxes our focus on it. It allows us to observe our mind in action and helps create a space between the mind and ourselves. The realization that we are not our minds is what causes us to awaken from it.
A near death experience can cause people to look back on their lives and question them. It helps them realize what is truly important (which is more than likely not aligned with their minds importance) therefore helps them to break free from their old habitual conditioning and desire a more meaningful life.
Introspection is self explanatory, the questioning of one’s mental self. This requires a certain amount of awareness to begin with. It is this awareness that is doing the questioning. The more you connect with it, the more it will grow. If there was no awareness, there would be no questioning as in the example of the terrorist.
Mental suffering and the imbalanced world that we live in work in the same way. They are both reflections of how we have veered so far away from our true balanced selves. The worse our personal or collective situation gets, the more likely we are to question it.
The best way to become aware and to awaken would be to observe your mind for a period of about 20-30 minutes a day or however long feels comfortable to you. This will create a space (awareness) between your thoughts and you which will grow over time and allow you to connect to your true self and awaken.
Awakening is not easy and there are a lot of misconceptions about it which I will discuss in my next post.
