Awareness-2

AWARENESS (2)

This is like Dhoom 2.

Last month I wrote a post on the same subject, ‘Awareness’, of course that was in a different context, it was on our real physical surroundings in which one has to be cautious.

This post which I am writing now is a terminology which is quite often used in Art of Living (AOL) sessions. When I heard it in the beginning, it was quite abstract, was not very clear what the teacher is trying to convey.

Let us try to analyze this terminology.

The definition of ‘Awareness’ as per wikipedia is as follows:
In biological psychology, awareness comprises a human's or an animal's perception and cognitive reaction to a condition or event. Awareness does not necessarily imply understanding, just an ability to be conscious of, feel or perceive.

In other words it is our perception or feeling to an event in our day today life.

Our perception is based on our knowledge & understanding.

At this point of time, I would like to bring certain view points on the terminology, knowledge & awareness. Generally we take it both meaning the same, but actually there is a subtle difference, let me explain this by an example:

We all know that smoking is injurious to health, it will lead to cancer etc. This is knowledge. Doctor also knows this, but you might come across doctors smoking heavily. Why so, they are in a helpless situation since they feel smoking is unavoidable, don’t feel like giving up. This situation leads to unawareness (feeling of inability to give up). So knowledge alone is not good, unless you put forth in practice. Practicing knowledge becomes awareness.

Let me narrate another incident that happened in our office a couple of days before to explain more in detail about ‘Awareness’.

We go for inspection of different sections of the company on a monthly basis after giving prior notifications well in advance so that the section’s designated representative is also present with us during the inspection so that if there is any discrepancy it can be sorted out immediately on the spot.

On one day in one section, the concerned person of the section was not present, he did not inform us anything about his absence. He was not answering his mobile too. All other members of the team requested that the inspection be completed. According to the code it is mandatory for the section representative to be present; hence I declined & cancelled the inspection. This was the second time in the past three months he was defaulting. I wrote to my boss about his attitude in ignoring the inspections. Next day I got an apology mail from the section rep that he regretted his action & sought a fresh date. Every body came & congratulated me that I cancelled the inspection. At that particular moment I started bloating, feeling high in my ego. Then I very well remembered ego should be avoided at all costs, this knowledge combined with feeling of humility brought me the awareness, which is very often talked about in our follow up sessions.

Hence awareness is a feeling of the knowledge which you have acquired.