F I L O S O F I A
Tautologies:
Real Recognize Real
During a recent conversation with a friend of mine from college, he said something meaningful – something along the lines of, “Its about self-awareness.” And this soundbite, this code, this spell, clicked in my head. Lights that were off, were now on, from 0 to 1. And I chewed this truth for a second before the train arrived to take me to new thoughts. Self-awareness … How well do I know my self? Or how well can I claim to know myself? Is there a proof for self-awareness and is proof necessary?
I thought to myself, in terms of self-awareness, I believe that I am far along on this journey. Self-awareness began with self-consciousness and insecurity. So I consider how much I analyze myself now and over the years and I have nothing to compare this to. I take it to be enough though, because every tub must stand on its own bottom. Lauryn Hill said that.
But not to digress, I began to think further about how aware can one be of oneself. Would you believe that I have more than two eyes? Would you believe that for every person I’m connected to, every person I love whose life matters to me, I have their eyes in addition to mine. Their ears, their hands, their energies, their beings coexist with mine. Although I cannot animate their flesh, I hear their stories and their experiences influence my understanding of all that is. So when, for example, a loved one shares the things they’ve seen or heard, I have seen and heard these too. First, when they did yet I did not know, and a second time – when they tell me about it – and effectively an infinite number of times, whenever I am reminded of it.
All that is, is connected. Whether there is someone there to hear the tree fall in the forest or not, if the tree fell, it changed the dynamic of the forest. There is one less tree standing, one more tree fallen. It changes the environment literally and these changes, like all changes, have domino effects that we can perceive at varying degrees prior to conscious realization of the fact. In essence, I take self-awareness to extend to awareness of all that is for self is all that is and all that is, is self. This might be confusing for first time readers of me, but it will make sense if we start at a base assumption and work our way up from there.
If you have a different base assumption for your belief system, then these words will be tough to chew. They will be hard on the throat and stomach like corn alcohol...
Consider a cup. In this cup, we pour natural water without any added minerals or manipulation. If we were to put a lid on this cup to ensure that nothing else entered except the water, and left for a few days, when we come back, we should expect to find nothing less than the same natural water. Well, whether or not it’s the same is arguable as the water is now older, maybe wiser, and possibly frustrated at being cramped in this cup for so long. The moniker, “you get out what you put in” is relevant here as one who returns to the cup shall find what was initially poured into the cup. Suppose overnight, someone came and poured sugar into the cup without anyone else knowing. This is parallel to the tree that falls without anyone hearing it. More generally, the question seems to be about imperceptible changes and whether or not they actually occur or have an effect prior to conscious realization of the fact.
My understanding of the cosmos is such that, upon sneaking into the room to put sugar into the cup, the person who poured the natural water into the cup will receive a preconscious alert of the fact, which they may or may not be able to decipher. This alert could be an itching elbow, a dream, or them witnessing someone put something into another cup, unbeknownst to another person. So when the original cup is opened the next day, and the person takes a sip of it, one might not know there is sugar in the cup until one tested it in some fashion such as drinking it or using a special litmus test for sugar. All in all, the moniker remains true – “you get out what you put in.”
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