Often there are discussions in the spiritual books and discourses about the inner connection. It is often said that we need to connect to our inner selves. Some call that inner self, some true self, some consciousness, some God, and there are many other names used for the same. A question arises how do we connect to that inner self? There are many ways to connect to the inner self such as Bhakti, Jnana, Karma, and Rajjoga. However, to the best of my understanding, awareness is the most important ingredient of all these paths, just like milk is the most important ingredient of all shakes. Intelligence is like the fruit that we mix with milk.
Awareness is often misunderstood. Of course, we all are aware. We are aware of our bodies, our relationships, the subjects we study, the rules and regulations that are applicable to us, the techniques of the work we perform at the workplace, and so many other things that we notice in our day-to-day lives. That is the awareness in the functional domain. That is critical to ensure our survival. We are not discussing functional awareness. What is critical for the inner journey is psychological awareness. Awareness of what we are.
Our brain is a wonderful machine with a huge capacity to mirror the ecosystem. A baby learns to walk observing others to walk. He learns the language too by observing others to speak. Our brain mirrors whatever it sees and listens to around itself. That is how we learn the culture, rituals, and traditions that are prevalent in our society. While mirroring all these things, we generally do not challenge the truth behind these. A baby does not challenge the language it learns. It just mirrors. It does not analyze whether the language is grammatically correct or not. Almost all our initial influences are like that. Whatever we look around constitutes the building blocks of our mindset and we start believing in that. If we are born in a criminal society, crime becomes normal to us. If we are born in a religious society, the rituals take center stage in our lives. Mirroring requires awareness. Copying in the examination also requires awareness and intelligence, however, to be an expert on the subject, we need a different type of intelligence and awareness. Similarly, to understand life, we need awareness and intelligence that is as wide as the universe and functional awareness and intelligence are hardly of any use.
Generally, with all the information that mirror neurons acquire by mirroring others in society, the hard drive of our brain copies a lot of data and we keep identifying with that data. As and when life throws questions to us, we run a search command in that database and try to find answers to the questions. That database is a creation of the experiences that different members of the society encountered at different points in time. This is not awareness and intelligence that are needed to move along the spiritual path. We can not be aware of the building we live in unless we come out of the room we are staying in and then look at the building. We can not look at the train we have boarded unless we get down the same and then look at the trains standing on the platform.
The first step in the process of awareness is to deboard our own train. Unless we learn to see our own thoughts and mindset objectively, there is no awareness. If we observe the other trains while traveling in our own train, we can never appreciate the other trains. Whatever we see is a very false representation of the reality. If the other train is moving in the same direction and at the same speed, we may still get some idea of the train. If the two trains are moving in opposite directions or different directions, we get to see very little and then we draw conclusions about the other train based on that limited observation and these false impressions drive our lives. That is how we make mental stories about different people and their lives. It is because we are never ready to get off our own train and get into the other train to observe that. Awareness requires getting off the train of our own mindset and through the process and examining that objectively. Intelligence performs a different function of putting all these experiences together and developing an understanding of them as a whole.
Thus, awareness requires that little space between us and our thoughts. The first step is to realize that our thoughts are just the product of our conditioning. The society we are born and brought up has a significant influence on our thought process. As we become aware of this process, we get off the train of our thoughts and that gives us the freedom to get into other trains and explore the same. We get into different trains and explore the same without getting fixated on any of the trains. If we get fixated on a different train, we again move away from awareness. We keep exploring different trains and the platform and the city and the country. We explore the nature and different manifestations of nature. In the process, we realize that all these are different databases that are being used by different computers including "I" and one thing that connects all these "I" is the electric current that is making all these possibilities a reality. That intelligence does something wonderful to us. In Vipassana, when we dissociate from our body and thoughts and observe the sensations, pleasant and painful, without reaction, in that state of awareness, we feel connected to the whole of the universe and all individuals that form part of the same universe.
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