Increasing one’s awareness is the most important undertaking on the road to enlightenment. All of us want to be clear, stable, peaceful, happy, wise and content. Each of us in our own way, even if we are not conscious of it at the time, is looking to belong, be accepted, liked, loved and appreciated. We all want a life that is kinder to us and our loved ones, easier, successful and leaves us with a feeling of how good it is to be alive. All of these things depend on increasing awareness. Awareness is a huge topic with many elements. However, we are arguably focusing on the most important aspect of awareness which is understanding your blind spot.
Your blind spot is the part of you not easily seen, the part of you that even if you were aware of to some extent you largely remain busy defending, justifying or denying because of the bitter taste certain aspects of you leave in the mind. So it’s much easier to write them off with other explanations that absolve you of any blame or responsibility. Even a very aware person, unless they have faced and embraced their blind spot would only be at very best 75% aware.
Most individuals would only have half this awareness because unless they are actively looking and developing their consciousness and awareness they would tend to be caught up within the limitations of their conditioning, patterns and the pursuit of what most people think is really important, namely kudos, status, measuring one’s achievements by material gains etc. In fact, all these things limit one’s awareness. And so, most individuals would be doing well to have 50% awareness and those whom we might describe as very special in some way would range from maybe 60-75%. This is because one’s blind spot is around 25% of the field of awareness. It is a sizeable proportion though it can, with ambition, determination and compassion be embraced and understood and with that comes the opportunity of complete awareness. Complete awareness is enlightenment. A state of true transparency, where one is completely clean and clear within and as a result of one’s own vision being crystal clear, no mysteries remain as the veil of ignorance and limitation is no longer able to obscure one’s view of the world.
Given that about 25% of us remains unknown, it becomes clear that the most important aspect of self transformation is to increase our awareness because without awareness we cannot even begin to see what is wrong and that in fact the biggest obstacle standing in our way is ourselves. Nothing blocks one’s path to peace and power more than the self. Even if we don’t take up the challenge of understanding our blind spot, increasing our awareness is desperately needed with regard to; our relationships, how we respect and treat others, how we relate to our planet, how we respect ourselves, how we go about the business of pursuing our dreams and ambitions. We need to increase our awareness in all these areas because if we don’t we can only ever be shadows of ourselves. We’ll never really be what we’re capable of being.
So start increasing your awareness in terms of self, relationship, environment and the drives and motivations that underpin your actions. If you start increasing your awareness in these areas, your blind spot will start to become clear because the stuff to which you are currently blind is hidden in your moods, attitudes, your values, your approach to life, the way you treat other people etc. In fact all your conscious activity hides the truth about your unconscious position (your blind spot) and so the more that you take an honest look in these areas the more you will begin to see those things that you’ve tried hardest to avoid seeing. There is no doubt that you will need help in making these discoveries and therefore feedback is a very valuable mirror in self evaluation, but only where the mirror can be trusted. So treat this subject with the respect it deserves and it will pay you enormous dividends in return.