Becoming More Self-Aware

Posted On March 24, 2023 / Written by Dr. Linda Gadbois

The most basic process for becoming more self-aware is to learn how to be present in your body and aware of your immediate environment. Your body is your vehicle (medium) for attaining awareness of yourself and for creating how you interact with the world around you as a means of experiencing yourself through it, as an essential part of it. You can use your body to intentionally tune into the emotional frequencies that are actively expressing in the environment around you. Your body is a fundamental part of the entire material world and is constantly in tune with it energetically (instinctively), which means everything in the outer world can be known directly through the intimate feeling you get when you focus on and become aware of it. You’re always aware of and being influenced by the dynamic layering of active energies you’re steeped in at any moment in time. In the most basic sense, we all exist in a turbulent sea of emotional energy that’s connected to and acts to draw in and utilize instinctual intelligences that populate the atmosphere (astral field) around us.

When you hear the term collective unconscious, which we participate in by virtue of having an unconscious (subconscious) mind, it’s referring to the greater field of consciousness we’re all apart of that’s governed by instinctual forces which are activated and driven almost exclusively by emotional impulses and electrical discharges. There’s no individuality in this aspect and level of the mind. This is what you can think of as the group mind of the Earth’s soul, where every being that’s a part of it is governed by the same field of information (memory) and electrical impulses that systematically propagate through it, where the aspect they draw on is based on their archetypal class and species. What makes humans different from all other species and kingdoms on Earth is that we also have a conscious mind, which is of a different type of collective mind. Our conscious mind is our creative mind of thought and will, and is creative in terms of how we use it in forming our individuality.  It’s what gives us the ability to think in words that naturally form mental concepts, pictures, and images in our mind’s eye, to reason and problem solve, to discriminate and rationally evaluate things as the basis for making calculated, well thought out decisions which we then actively turn into a reality that provides us with the basis for experiencing our own creations.

This is the part of us that thinks linguistically as a form of inner dialogue, where we’re always talking to ourselves as a means of producing how we experience everything by molding it into an ongoing storyline (life theme) that we’re always in the process of telling ourselves. If you simply turn your awareness inward and observe your own internal processes, you’ll notice that ‘one part of you’ is always talking to ‘another part of you’ or is engaged in a conversation with a higher power of some kind as your natural thought-processes. Your conscious mind is your rational mind which is nearly always explaining, describing, and justifying things in order to make them mean something. Our experiences naturally arise out of the ongoing story we’re always in the process of telling ourselves that’s formed out of meaning we give things.

As we think about something we build it into an internal representation (IR) on the inner planes of our mind that serves to represent a particular type of experience. Based on how we present the idea to ourselves as a possible experience, we naturally act to generate a corresponding emotion in response to it. The emotion coupled with the IR determines how we actively express it through an ongoing story we’re always in the process of telling ourselves as a means of creating how we experience our life. As we mentally create our own experiences inwardly, we then associate and identify with our own creation, shaping ourselves in relation to it. This is the most basic process we’re always using as the means of creating ourselves. This is the creative part of your mind that turns thoughts into outer realities as a means of experiencing yourself through and as the main character in your own self-made movie (story).

The story you began telling yourself when you were young as a means of trying and make sense of what was going on around you, was initially formed through your formative conditioning before your conscious mind began developing and you were living primarily out of your emotional states. As a child you began using your imagination to form imaginary realities out of how you felt and what emotions you were experiencing at the time. This occurs naturally while your conscious mind is in its initial stage of developing (7 to 8 years old), where as you began forming thoughts of your own, they were driven almost entirely by your feelings and emotions, which were being generated automatically by whatever behaviors and activities were going on around you at the time and that you were a natural part of. These behavioral patterns are called dynamics because they’re formed out of greater patterns as a formula and combination of everything actively expressing in a situation. You’re never just influenced by one person, one activity, or one behavior in a situation, it’s a combination formed by everything in close proximity that’s even remotely a part of the situation. Dominant influences simply direct the flow of activity based on how it exerts a direct influence on everything else, shifting it to match its vibration as an attitude and mindset.

This activity, which normally takes place below the level of direct awareness, can be readily understood by simply cultivating the ability to become aware of internal processes set in motion through outside activity. Everything in the material world functions through vibration as polarities that stimulate each other into an active state of expression through the Law of Cause and Effect, or stimulus-response, where they also switch polarities through a rhythmic back and forth movement where the effect produced then becomes causal in its return flow. While we can certainly understand this principle conceptually, gaining an intellectual knowledge of it that’s objective and non-personal in nature, we can more importantly gain an intuitive understanding of it by turning our attention inwardly and observing how we experience it internally as sensations that act to naturally produce a correlating response.

The only way we have of actually knowing something is through a direct experience of it. This is because at the level of energy, consciousness, and spirit, everything operates through law, which is an objective, non-personal process that provides the basis for translating into a personal experience. Energy functions in an automatic manner at the subtle level, and is what stimulates and gives rise to the quality of energy out of which a dynamic series of personalized experiences are formed that are all correlated to each other, forming a larger pattern as a behavioral dynamic that follows a distinct theme. The universal theme is formed out of the frequency that’s actively expressing in any situation which serves as the connective element that ties everything together in a logical and cohesive way, where as they play out together they still make sense to everyone involved in terms of how they’re interpreted in a slightly different way to form a plethora of variations that are all congruent and harmonious in nature. Everybody that’s a part of and actively playing a role in creating the same situation, will experience it in a way that’s unique to them, because everyone is creating how they experience it out of their own mental model.

At the subconscious level of the group mind, emotion and the memories associated with the emotions are the creative force and universal language that governs all activity. The group mind can be thought of as the atmosphere (field of organized light) that surrounds and is being formulated by the Earth as its soul, consciousness, and archetypal memory (etheric blueprint). The atmosphere around us contains the memory of the Earth’s soul as the field of information that’s comprised of instinctual forces that act to design, inform, and instruct all life on earth. This field operates through electrical impulses that serve to bring different aspects into an active state of expression, and once the proper group of qualities are activated and called forth, they form a living pattern of activity that plays out while constantly encountering, taking on, and integrating new qualities as it moves through the atmosphere from one location to the next. We’re constantly exchanging energy as varying degrees of consciousness with everything around us through a form of cellular respiration.

As we move through this invisible, atmospheric field of living forces, we’re constantly being stimulated by them, where our formula of active qualities at any given moment and point are harmonious with the environment we’re a natural part of. This is how instinct and the subconscious works. We experience these in the normal sense as subtle nuances that come as feelings and sensations, and occasionally as a pronounced electrical charge or emotional trigger. As we go along our energy field is constantly flexing and shimmering into variable states that reflect and are of the same consciousness as the environment we’re an essential part of. The problem arises from us not being aware of this or failing to comprehend how it works in the most practical sense. So let’s take a moment to tune into and simply observe how this operates within us as a normal process of cause and effect, stimulus response, and action reaction.

Set aside moments throughout your day where you can observe this process as it occurs within you. Truth can only be known through direct experience that brings insight into the invisible, subtle, underlying activity of energy. As you go through your day, when the moment is appropriate for inner reflection, and you’re in a situation where a distinct attitude or passion is being expressed, allow yourself to notice how it is you’re being internally stimulated by it. Notice where in your body you feel a pronounced sensation and what it feels like, what does it bring alive inside of you? Notice that as it brings the sensation alive as a feeling or emotion of some kind, it also has an idea associated with it that forms a mental impression of some kind and sets a whole internal process of activity in motion. This process is based on the meaning inherent in the emotional charge produced. As it stimulates you, notice that you associate it with a memory of some kind that has a particular theme inherent in it. As you instantly reference an existing memory associated with the feeling, where the present feeling is associated with a past memory formed out of the same feeling, there’s a part of you that says, ‘this means the same thing as that’, and this interpretation is what forms the basis of your natural reaction or interaction. As you’re stimulated it adjusts your mental state to match it as a natural process of equilibrium.

As the other person or outside force stimulates you with a feeling or emotion, a form of energetic calibration takes place, where your state is formed as a direct correspondence to their state. As an emotion that’s correlated with an idea is brought alive inside of you as an effect produced by the outside activity, you incorporate the energetic transmission into your mental model (signature frequency), modifying it accordingly, and through your expression as a return of the same emotional state and idea, it then becomes causal by stimulating them in a like fashion, producing a slightly varied state in them. You act to modify the active energy by how you translate it through your mental model and what thoughts you match to the emotion, and as you continue to interact a back and forth movement of correlated energy takes place that’s constantly adjusting the shared state based on new feelings or ideas that are communicated.

Communication, in the most basic sense, isn’t only based on the words that are spoken, it’s a full body expression. We communicate using our whole body and being, which includes not only the idea being communicated through the words we’re using, but also the feeling and attitude associated with it based on how we say it. It comes as more of a unified, synchronistic movement of your entire mental field and way of expressing it. The words merely form the initial idea as a mental concept shaped and given life by the attitude and tone of voice we employ in saying it, and how our gestures and body language further emphasize how we mean it. Our body is the part of us that’s always tuned into our environment and is present all the time, feeling all the energetic nuances and moods being actively expressed by everything around us. We’re always reading the energy around us by becoming like it in feeling sensations, so we can form immediate and appropriate responses without having to think about them or analyze what we’re feeling.

It’s only the conscious aspect of our mind that’s consumed in the eternal reality of our own thoughts, where we’re lost in time, so to speak, living out of the make-believe world we’re always constructing and reconstructing out of memories in the faculty of our imagination. When you step out of the imaginary world of thought for a brief period, and become intimately present in your own body, noticing all the sensations taking place, you can begin realizing how your state is constantly being adjusted by all the subliminal activity going on around you. As your state shifts and varies from moment to moment, so do your natural thoughts and what type of ideas that run through your mind in an automated fashion. Through a process of introspection you can come to recognize and understand how it is that you’re always being shaped as a product of your environment, usually without being aware of it. Through awareness of your own internal processes you can begin recognizing how it is that you’re always in the process of becoming like the people around you through your interaction and what part of your character is being brought alive in relation with them.

In a similar fashion, you can also take time to sit quietly for a few minutes, clear all your thoughts as best you can, relax your body, create a calm inner state, and then introduce a thought or intentionally focus on something, while paying attention to how your body automatically responds to your own thoughts about things. As you think about something, based on how you present the idea to yourself as an possible experience, your body will automatically generate an emotion in response to it. The emotion generated becomes the active, motivating force that determines how that idea becomes expressed in your current situation or daily life to produce how you experience it. This will give you insight into how it is that you’re constantly determining your emotional state based on what you focus on, think about, and build into a possible reality in your imagination. Also, allow yourself to notice that tension is produced in your body by the emotions related to your thoughts, whether they’re positive or negative, and that as a result, emotions are held in your body (muscle) as cellular memory.

Through this basic awareness of invisible processes that can be known internally, you can begin not only gaining control of your own reactions and automated tendencies, but once mastered to a high enough level of consistency, you can manage your own internal state as a means of intentionally influencing others and directing their behaviors through suggestion. You can plant a seed delivered with the proper feeling and attitude that will determine how it’s developed by the person conceiving it. But in order to do this, you have to first be able to manage your own internal state through a direct awareness of what feelings and qualities are actively expressing around you, and instead of going unconscious and playing into whatever you’re being stimulated by, you can intentionally gain rapport with them by ‘becoming like them’ (mirroring), both mentally and physically. You can embody the same mental state, demeanor, and posturing for a short period of time, matching and mirroring them, so to speak, and then begin gradually changing your inner state and body language, and they will naturally follow you into a whole new state of mind and attitude.

Our Mental State Determines Our Reality

Allow yourself to notice that whatever your state of mind is at any moment, is being reflected back to you through your perception of the outer world. The outer world is always formed as a reflection or projection of our inner world. Our inner state shapes ideas as metaphors that have a larger theme correlated with them, allowing them to be adapted to any situation  where they naturally form new variations of the same idea. Our mental model is what’s always forming and maintaining our perception of the outer world, where we modify everything to take on the same basic idea as an energetic state and attitude. An idea can be expressed in any number of situations, using whatever elements are available in that situation, forming it into the same type of idea as an experience. Another way to think about this is by realizing that whatever mood you’re in at any given moment, determines what type of things you focus on, what memories you replay over and over in your mind and use to build numerous scenarios, what type of things you think about in an automated manner, what you notice in everything around you, and what you tell yourself about everything that makes it mean what it does.

In the most basic sense, everything that comprises and forms our material reality is based on our mental model, which is a form of archetype that serves as a prototype for producing a consistent type of experience. Our mental model is what gives our life continuity. As we form an idea on the inner planes of imagination (image turned into a nation) we bring it alive as a corresponding vibration by constructing it into an internal representation formed out of sensation. We construct it by imbuing it with sensory attributes and qualities that cause it to come alive with movement on the mental plane, causing a correlating response on the material plane of the body. As we vibrate it internally, the frequency formed has a metaphorical pattern inherent in it that operates through polarity to construct, reconstruct, and consistently form that same type idea as our outer perception. As we move through the atmosphere, we’re constantly calibrating it to resemble and reflect back to us our own thoughts and beliefs about it. This polarized movement comes as a rhythmic flow of cause and effect which, as it flows from an inner to an outer pole of the same idea, reverses polarity, and absorbs the experience created through its own mental projection, building it back into the model that projected it, upgrading it through the incorporation of any new variables or possibilities attained, altering its vibration slightly, to form the next projection.

As we look through our mental paradigm (perceptual lens), which vibrates at the frequency of our constitution, we organize the information available in the outer world to match it, which is what allows us to experience ourselves, and come to know ourselves through our own mental projection. Our mind vibrates at the frequency of our inner composition, and acts on the outer field of probability and latent potential to only activate (vibrate) and bring forward (in our awareness) what’s of an equivalent nature or quality of consciousness (order through natural selection), and recomposes it to produce a variation of our soul’s signature frequency as a life theme. This is what sets the stage for us to act out our life experiences. We bring alive everything around us that’s of the same essence and nature as we are and reconstruct it to produce an experience of ourselves as an essential part of our own mental construct. What tends to make this elusive in the most basic sense, is that the outer world is constructed to resemble the entire content of our mind, including the parts of ourselves that we’ve repressed, suppressed, disowned, and lost direct awareness of. It’s through our ability to determine our own, personal reality that we also create ourselves by how we then associate and identify with the world of our own making.

Our mind is a field of highly organized information formed out of memory of ourselves as different aspects of our character that are reflected back to us on a larger scale that’s more diverse and inclusive (the One becomes the many, and the many are molded back into One). We construct the same archetypal idea outside of us that originates inside of us, so we can experience ourselves through and as a fundamental part of our own creation. We project the outer world through our perception of it, reshaping it to be of the same nature as we are, and then interpret our own perception to tell a consistent story as a means of creating how we experience ourselves. How you experience something isn’t based on an objective process, it’s based on how you interpret what’s happening to or around you, that makes it mean something. The meaning you give it forms the internal dialogue you generate that accompanies it as a form of story or narrative that you tell yourself as a means of experiencing your own creation. The memory you form out of the experience isn’t based on the physical situation or event itself, it’s formed out of how you interpreted the event by molding it into an ongoing story you’re always in the process of telling yourself. The outer formation created is then absorbed and integrated back into your mental model, which served to produce it in the first place.

The relationship that exists between thought and emotion is one of the most basic ways we can understand the relationship that exists between the two aspects of our conscious and subconscious, which is also what we call our higher and lower nature. By realizing these are complementary aspects of the same mind, we can learn to work using their main features and how they function together in forming a single reality. Our conscious mind functions as thought that we construct into whole realities using the faculty of our imagination, and also in translating those realities into memory; while our subconscious is of an emotional nature and functions by using memory to produce all of our natural activities. Due to the fact that we’re born into the world with only our subconscious active as are instinctual nature, by the time our conscious mind of thought and reasoning begins developing, they’re run by our emotions, and we use the creative ability of our thoughts to form whole realities that serve to express our emotional state (this is what illusions are).

Because we don’t realize this at a young age, and nobody teaches us about how our mind works to form our reality, we become accustomed to our lower nature running our thoughts and utilizing its ability to create by producing emotional dramas in place of rational reasoning. By the time we hit puberty, where our conscious mind becomes prominent in being able to create based on how we identify with our own thoughts and experiences, we’re living almost exclusively out of the emotional states and dynamics formed out of our conditioning, and we shape our identity by how we associate with our own emotional delusions. When we continue through adulthood without learning or realizing how our own mind-body system works, we spend our whole life living an illusion born out of a primarily unconscious state. We allow our thoughts to be governed by our emotions and run in a habitual manner, completely unchecked. We then create ourselves to be an intelligent animal, never developing the higher capacities of reasoning and rational thinking, which are necessary to become self-aware and master our ability to be self-determined by learning how to create ourselves in a more intentional way by utilizing our emotional nature to fuel our thoughts, instead of letting them determine our thoughts.

Some people will swing to an extreme and play off the idea that we need to cleanse ourselves of our emotional nature altogether, by only relying on our rational mind. Yet this sets us up for failure because we become plagued with a constant form of inner conflict and always having to resist the impulses flowing naturally throughout our body and environment. The secret to life is always about bringing what exists as complementary aspects into a balanced state, where their union is harmonious and one complements and accentuates the other. This process of equilibrium is achieved by recognizing the laws that govern each one and how they exist in polarity to each other as a relationship and way of interacting that produces a unified reality. While each aspect of our conscious and subconscious is governed by different laws, these laws function in the most basic sense through polarity, where one acts naturally to stimulate the other into an active state, and once in an active state, serves to stimulate (vibrate) the other one in return. These two aspects of the mind are not separate from each other or different minds in themselves, they’re polar aspects of the same mind and are necessary to produce movement as vibration.

What this shows us is that what we imagine to be outside of us is actually an extension of us being projected as a mirror image of what’s inside of us, where the one becomes the many, and the many become one. What we see outside exists silently inside of us, and what we see when we look inside of ourselves is the metaphorical seed that’s birthing and maintaining the outside as the means for attaining a consistent type of experience. This is what know yourself means. On the higher plane of the true conscious mind, the entire lower world exists in its archetypal form as the seed for generating our reality through a form of growth process that we experience as a dynamic unfolding, where we move in a synchronized fashion through correlated stages and phases of development. Our world is constantly being ordered, assembled, and maintained by our higher mind. The conscious mind can be thought of as the architect who designs the whole scheme as a mental concept (memory), and the subconscious as the builder, who takes the metaphorical design and uses it as a frequency for organizing and equivalent outer world through resonance. Once the whole outer world of living light is constructed as a stable, stationary field of organized light, it then enters into its own creation as the centralized, internal awareness, in order to experience it as a fully sensationalized flow of consciousness made real.

Summary

The most basic way to become more self-aware is to remain present in your everyday life, where you maintain a constant awareness of everything going on around you and how it is you’re being stimulated and effected by it. Tune into your inner nature and become aware of how you feel in relation to everything around you, or to whomever it is you’re directly interacting with. With enough practice you can train your mind to fluently move back and forth between the outer reality playing out on a large scale, to the inner world of pure feeling that’s acting to project it while also being stimulated by it. Whatever is motivating the outer activity always brings alive the same feelings and motive internally. Through this process of shifting back and forth between your conscious, inner self, and your unconscious, outer self, you can form an awareness of not only how it is you’re being shaped energetically in association with the outer, but also how to work with controlling your own inner state so you can directly influence others and whatever is around you in an intentional manner. Keep in mind that you’re also effecting everything around you in the same way you’re being effected by it, and once you gain a clear idea of the mental state of the person you’re interacting with, and you let it determine your state for a brief period of time, matching it, so to speak, you can then intentionally change your state gradually, and they’ll follow your lead.

Dr. Linda Gadbois

Transpersonal Psychologist, Mind-Body Health Consultant, and Spiritual Teacher