Awareness Development...

[Marcus]

I have been thinking a lot recently, about how we can develop our awareness. And to be honest I haven't found a lot of material on this. I see a lot on spiritual development, and personal development etc...but those focus on specific personality traits.

The way I see awareness, is that it covers every aspect of our personal interpretation of reality and life. Thus, the greater our awareness the more balanced we can become.

I wrote a bit about the idea of expanding / balancing our awareness here:

Awareness Development

And that brings me onto another subject. I feel that expanding our awareness leads to "conscious thought". That is being aware of what is going on within our minds - rather than simply reacting to our internal processes on auto-pilot. "Conscious thought" moves us away from the every day robotic behavior towards something vastly different.

My thoughts are that the ideas on "Positive Thinking", whilst certainly well intended, don't really help de-program us from our conditioning:

Postive Thought vs. Conscious Thought

Does anyone else see a distinction between these two aspects; or have I totally mis-understood what I have read and learnt about the concept of positive thinking?

[Mark Lapierre]

Regarding awareness development

Have you read Descartes' Error by Antonio Damasio? It shows how emotion, reason and other forms of cognition combine, including how the dichotomy of emotional versus rational/logical thinking is invalid; there is always an emotional component to thought, even if that emotion is labeled "calm". It's still an emotion as opposed to a lack of emotion.

But I'll grant that most people do see a distinction so the point you made is relevant.

I agree that a balanced approach to learning is ideal, but I find your pyramid a little unclear. I think it's because in the base you have two continuums, one of acquiring knowledge, the other of modes of thinking. But it doesn't seem to allow opposite corners to meet. E.g., it doesn't seem possible to apply logical thinking to personal experience, or emotional thinking to authoritative knowledge.

But regardless I do agree with your main point, that a balanced approach in both how we acquire knowledge and experiences, and how we think about them, will lead to greater awareness than any other approach.

You might also be interested in Jason's post on the 5 levels of awareness, and mine on Four stages of personal development.

Regarding positive thought vs. conscious thought...

One of the things that Freud got right was that we're largely creatures of unconscious drives. That is, most of the activity in our brain is unconscious activity. Positive thinking, as it's intended to be, builds on that understanding by attempting to turn conscious thought into unconscious thoughts/attitudes/responses/behaviours. We've already talked about the issues of ambiguous definitions, and here again we see the problem because your description of conscious thinking as an effective, gentle, encouraging way of increasing your awareness and understanding of yourself, can also be applied to positive thinking, depending on what you know about positive thinking.

Either term on their own is misleading. Positive thinking implies ignoring/repressing negative thoughts, but conscious thinking implies ignoring/repressing unconscious thoughts. Neither connotations are accurate, but observations of the issues with either pair of labels applies equally to both.

But I don't blame you for being mis-lead, there is much material on positive thinking which is overly simplistic, not only in not covering the topic in detail, but making the topic seem as if there is no detail to be covered!

Also, positive thinking is aimed more at happiness, and conscious thinking is aimed more at awareness. So ultimately the thinking you might do when practicing positive thinking would be different to the thinking you do when practicing conscious thinking because you're doing them for different purposes.