META AWARENESS

Please read the following, not as a series of truth claims, but as an experiment.  The experiment is to see if you can shift the vantage point from which you see and feel your direct experience - such that you temporarily move into a bit of a different perspective. 

You have a physical body.  But you are NOT simply the physical body that you are experiencing right now.  Rather you are what is aware of your body in this moment.

You have a mental stream.  But you are definitely more than the thoughts that you are experiencing right now.  You are NOT simply the stream of thoughts that - right now - is echoing these very words.  Rather you are what is aware of this ongoing stream of thoughts. 

You have emotions.  You may or may not be noticing that you are hosting large or small traces of one or more emotions right now.  You might notice such traces in your physical body and/or your mental process.  Whether or not you notice traces exactly right now - you can remember times that emotions influenced or even dominated your somatic experience and your mental process.  But no matter how powerful the emotions that you have felt in your life have been - you are NOT simply your emotions.  Rather you are what is aware of your emotions.

You have perceptions of the (apparently) external world.  Right now you are experiencing a visual field in which the screen that you are reading these words arises.  You are also experiencing auditory sensations: whether loud or faint.  And whether you are attending to them or not, you are also experiencing smells and tastes (although they maybe very faint), in this very moment.  You, of course, are NOT simply your perceptions.  Rather you are what is aware of your perceptions.

Something is looking out of your eyes and hearing from your ears.  Something is feeling the sensory and/or emotional feelings in your body.   Something is noticing that there are thoughts in your head.   

This something is - of course - not a something at all.  It is a deeper, more essential layer of You.

I am pointing to a different way to feel your self:  

To feel your self as awareness first, and everything else that you imagine your self to be second.

If you pay close attention to this moment, perhaps you can notice that everything the you take your self to be arises in This awareness that you are.

To the extent that you can feel yourself as this awareness - this awareness that your body, your emotions, your mental stream, your intuition, your imagination, and all your sensations are arising within right now - you already have some of the capability of Meta Awareness.

There are many advantages to having a strong capacity for Meta Awareness.  Perhaps the most important one for our purposes here is that it is an inner vantage point or perspective that will help you more rapidly learn and adapt to the continually changing environment that we all face.  

Most people have pet beliefs and want to believe certain things, even when the evidence turns in another direction.  Most people have trouble admitting that they are wrong when they are wrong - and thus waste time, energy and attention instead of adapting, improving and moving on.  These human tendencies are a big handicap in the face of the future that is racing towards us at an unprecedented pace.  Those of us who are working with these handicaps are at a significant disadvantage in comparison to those who have the Meta Awareness capacity to see and relate to their self and their thoughts in a non-defensive and objective way.

More dramatically, a high level of rational intelligence will no longer be a defendable strategic advantage in a future filled with computer systems running machine learning algorithms.  Those of us who want to stay relevant will need to develop new forms of intelligence that computers are still a long way from being able to replicate.  A strong capacity of Meta Awareness forms a higher ground from which human intelligence will have the potential to continue to add value even as machines render obsolete much of what we have historically called intelligence.

Meta Awareness is really more than an inner skill.  As it develops - a whole new layer of one's self unfolds into the world.  It changes who we are:

Slowly we release our clinging to who currently take ourselves to be.  And as we do we gain new inner flexibility and greater capacity to achieve and maintain conscious flow states through higher degrees of attunement to our selves, others and our environments.

As part of this change our body slowly relaxes out of the state of chronic tension that most of us live in (to some extent) which further contributes towards us becoming more open and better at learning and adapting in real time.