awareness

 

To talk about my own programming and how difficult it was to even come to the awareness that I was programmed as everyone is, and what is required to overcome it, is not a subject that I relish. But there is no other way to give an exact meaning of what it means to be “asleep.” It’s all fine and good for Castaneda to write about the how the Predator gave us its mind; for Gurdjieff and Ouspensky to write about the Evil Magician who hypnotizes his “sheeple”; for the Cassiopaeans to tell us that we are programmed and/or hypnotized; but until you have experienced awakening, or at the very least, have had a graphic description of the state before  and after, you simply cannot grasp it, I don’t think.

Laura Knight-Jadczyk, The Wave, Part 13e

 

 

“But I don’t want to be more aware” said Will. “I want to be less aware. Less aware of horrors like Aunt Mary’s death, and the slums of Rendang Lobo. Less aware of hideous sights and loathsome smells…”Less aware of my fat income and other people’s sub-human poverty. Less aware of my own excellent health in an ocean of malaria and hookworm, of my own safely sterilized sex-fun in the ocean of starving babies. ‘Forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ What a blessed state of affairs! But unfortunately I do know what I’m doing. Only too well. And here you go asking me to be even more aware than I am already.”

 

“I’m not asking anything” she said. “I’m merely passing on the advice of a succession of shrewd old birds…Start by becoming aware of what you think you are. It’ll help you to become aware of what you are in fact.”

Aldous Huxley, Island, 1962

 

 

The mastery of awareness is the riddle of the mind; the perplexity sorcerers experience when they recognize the astounding mystery and scope of awareness and perception.

Carlos Castaneda, The Power of Silence, 1987

 

 

Human awareness is like an immense haunted house. The awareness of everyday life is like being sealed in one room of that immense house for life. We enter the room through a magical opening: birth. And we exit through another such magical opening: death.

Sorcerers, however, are capable of finding still another opening and can leave that sealed room while still alive. A superb attainment. But their astounding accomplishment is that when they escape from that sealed room they choose freedom. They choose to leave that immense, haunted house entirely instead of getting lost in other parts of it.

Morbidity is the antithesis of the surge of energy awareness needs to reach freedom. Morbidity makes sorcerers lose their way and become trapped in the intricate, dark byways of the unknown.
Carlos Castaneda, The Power of Silence, 1987

 


If we do not expect the unexpected, we will never find it.

Heraclitus