By increasing our awareness, we can improve the effectiveness of our choices
When do we make one choice vs another? In life, we have lots of choices, and we can learn about a greater variety of choices all the time. But then, what do we choose? We have lots of options – even in typing something, we can type out one word, or another – it’s our choice. So how do we know what choice to make?
Take for a moment this example: you’re blindfolded at a table with knowledge of a fork, spoon, and a bowl of some kind of food in front of you. How would you know whether to use the fork or the spoon? Now, you might try the spoon and run into salad, and find out through experiment what’s there. But the very act of doing so increases your awareness. By increasing your awareness of what kind of food is in front of you, you’re able to know better which choice to make in order to eat the food in front of you in a more optimal way. Knowing it’s salad, you can then choose to use the fork.
So awareness can help in the realm of making choices. The more aware you are of the situation you’re in, the more informed your choices will be. Another way of putting it is that awareness helps establish the context in which you make your choices.
While awareness can be increased through things like gathering information through the senses (such as in the food example), there’s also awareness of one’s feelings, thoughts, emotions, and the situation one is in internally. For instance, inner dilemmas may be felt, but they can also be ignored, or be more slight and go undetected. By looking for feelings of dilemma and trying to become more aware of what that dilemma is all about, you may ultimately learn about the situation you’re in, as well as be able to develop choices that can better respond to that situation. This, to me, seems to speak to the importance of inner awareness for inner well-being. The more aware we are of our inner situation, the more informed our choices can be as we look to positively influence ourselves on that inner level.
This is also one reason why being honest and sharing what you’re aware of can help other people. Sharing your sense of what’s true can help them to make more effective choices for themselves, because they then know more about the context in which they’re making choices. Now, not everyone may handle your sense of “the truth” very well, but there are ways to handle this as well, such as not claiming certainty or authority, being tactful, being gentle, and being respectful.
Anyway, I just thought I’d share that little connection between awareness and choices. It seemed to me like a simple, perhaps obvious, but important distinction. Because of how important choices are, in that they govern how we respond to and can influence reality, consequently this shows how important awareness is. After all, while we can make uninformed choices, how much more effective might we be if we’re able to make informed choices? Thus by becoming more aware, the quality of our choices can become improved. Yes, perhaps one could become obsessive about awareness, but that’s also something one could become aware of, and respond to.
That said, take care, and all the best ^^
-Oliver
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Explore Your Inner World – all the techniques described here have to do with both increasing inner awareness and assisting the process of making choices that can affect us on an inner level.
Denial – denial seems to directly have to do with the tendency to try and limit one’s awareness in order to avoid problematic situations or feelings. This can nevertheless cause big problems, because the quality and effectiveness of one’s choices is diminished with denial
Find Yourself: A Quick Self-Discovery Activity – an article going over a fun little technique for meeting a part of yourself. These kinds of inner forces play a part in our lives, even if we’re not aware of them, thus, exercises like this that increase our awareness can help to better inform our choices with respect to such forces
