Self-Awareness & Awakeness

At the 30,000 foot level, I think I get what you are saying. 

My model for awakened maturity is Cook-Grueter's 9 stages of ego development and the latter stages of development basically requires a high degree of psychological development and some sort of practice that leads to an understanding of the nature of mind... so I guess there is a good correlation with "self-awareness" as the term is commonly used. Self in the later stages is pretty amorphous however.

However, my other inclination is to say that awakeness is something that is present regardless of a stage of development. It would be the sense that one's current experience is only a partial and imperfect description of reality. (My favorite description of "emptiness" is that experience is not as it appears, nor is it completely different from what appears.)





 

Awakeness is about not being in a non/unconscious trance state. And a trance state is fully buying into a belief about experience. So awakeness can happen in the midst of a delusion, as long as the delusion isn't fully believed. That person might not be what I would call self-aware --- they're in the thrall of an illusion -- but because they suspect/doubt the truth of the illusion they have awakeness.

As a practical example, when someone is trapped in some strange family dynamic, even if they can't get out of the experience, if they know that it's happening because of a bunch of triggers that they aren't even aware of... then I wouldn't want to call them self-aware because they are still confused about what is going on, but I would say they are awake in that moment, because they have doubts about the reality of what is going on. 

So incremental awakeness is a path to self awareness, perhaps? 

Anyway, that's my initial thoughts.

Chris Marti wrote: I have to think about your reply more, but my initial reaction is that we should not call someone "awake" who is only aware that they are in the throes of an illusion. It feels like that's a low bar to meet, probably too low. More later - I'm off to the eye doctor.

Ah, I see we're getting nouns and adjectives jumbled together...

Short revised statement: everything I think about awakeness and self awareness and development is found in Cook-Grueter's 9 stages of ego document. I'll send it to you via email since it is no longer publically available.

Yes, ditto, a compelling discussion but so far I don't have anything to contribute. Maybe I'll get a chance to read the article as well. 

Haven’t read anything but for the sake of supporting the thread here is my view.

I prefer Kenneth Folk’s take on this; 

Awakeness is Sati Pa as in a momentary thing. Profoundly mindful moment. It’s not outside of Anicca’s ripping embrace. As in, it is not resistant to impermanence. 

Aboutism would be gibberish about what we think awakeness is or was in our experience. Here there can be moments of Awakeness as we do gibberish but not necessarily so. There can also be lost in a trance of the story. 

Self awareness is but Awareness. We need no Self attached there. We can but we don’t need it. 

Both are one and the same in the moment of Sati Pa (profound mindfulness)

In the moment (and impermanent moment is all we have) of an experience there can’t be simultaneously arising of “knowing of how the mind works” along side of a sharp unpleasant experience on the skin which gets comprehended as an itch and accompanied by a mind image etc … This knowing how the mind works around this itch comes after the fact and is About Awakeness. 

Awareness, however is. I must say “self” in accordance for it to be “self-awareness”. Otherwise it just is. 

I think it’s more useful to talk about the myriad of sleeping Buddhas in need to Wake Up and they are part of this vast Mind. 
Just because 1 or 10 Buddhas are Awake it means not all the facets of the Mind are Awake. So many tiny Buddhas remain asleep in the vast Mind (mind we can’t see). Keep up at waking them up! Grab at them and give them a good shake! One by one … 

I think I have a similar framing as papa.

For me awareness is knowing the display of mind as "a display of mind" -- vivid yet empty. This is fairly binary - all or nothing. Even people who might be "more self-aware" can fall into unawareness, confusion, blanking out, trance...

Self-awareness is a more state-like "understanding the process of mind" that creates frameworks of self-other, here-there, meaning-irrelevant, and the more developmentally self-aware someone is, the more awareness is integrated into those frameworks. Eventually, this "self-aware" description doesn't even do it, because self itself is known as other mind object that is vivid but empty.

So for me, awareness is the first step... but it often takes activation energy before it transforms into self-awareness. And there are some aspects of self-awareness that are hierarchical (one becomes the foundation for another, etc) as described in Cook-Grueter. And "higher levels of self-awareness" are still prone to corruption because aspects of experience (sex, power, wealth, fame, potato chips) are prone to moments of forgetting they are vivid yet empty. 

And as papa said, all "states" are better described as tipping points. It is more like the center of gravity "tips" to the next stage, but not every aspect of the psyche gets transformed. The mental image I use for it is that if you have a balance scale, if you keep moving weights from one side to the other eventually the scale will "tip"... but there will still be weights on the other side. And if you have a very rusty scale, it might take a lot of weight for it to tip. Just physical metaphors for what happens biologically in this meat machine. 

Actually, what seems to happen is that if you can "stay in the knowing of the vivid yet empty display of mind" at one level, that is what tips it to the next level. Progress of insight works this way (staying mindful yet not fully identifying with one nana, leads to the next nana). Staying in the vivid yet empty display of one stage creates the insights for moving to the next stage. 

CG9 really should be required reading for anyone that aspires to a non-monastic spiritual life. It's one of those very useful models (there is a saying "no model is true, but some are useful") of reality.