It seems to me that once one is conscious of the fact that one is aware, we become a true animal. What I mean by that is, a tiger is not anything but a tiger, and a cactus is not anything but a cactus. However, a man (gender-neutrally used) becomes a man, once awareness strikes.
I was once in the Florida Everglades and was watching an Alligator show. There was a guy messing around with the snout of the beast. When asked why he was comfortable handling this dangerous animal, he said that it acted on instinct and if you understood that then its behavior was completely predictable.
There in lies a discernable difference between action induced by instinct and action induced by thought. The fact that I head to the refrigerator when I am hungry is instinct. But the fact that I chose sushi over kabab could be thought. You might argue it is a higher level instinct - but you get the point.
The level above actions driven by instinct could be actions driven by the force of the senses. Examples of this could be craving for an ice cream, mood to listen to music, watch a movie or other desires.
Imagine you are in a sensory deprivation tank (this is available in spas). You have no light, no sound, no touch, indeed no action. You still have thoughts, and you might ask yourself what is the nature of those thoughts.
After an initial momentum that carries over from the sensory-world, in the sensory-deprived world, you might slowly experience a different set of thoughts. These might be around, for example, memories, or around goals, perhaps even insults and compliments.
The thought experiement around the senory-deprivation tank is only to delineate a different order of thoughts and illustrate them, not to say that we dont have these thoughts in our everyday life.
What is the order of thought, that goes beyond relationships and accomplishments?
Life is a rush. Our personal affairs take hold of mind, intelligence, meemory and heart. Hece we can be severely and physically affected by the turn of events. A busy ladder of climbing the ladder of an organization, or achieving a title or making money, trains the mind and its power and invests it in 'the affairs of the world'
Our self-image is in the context of the affairs of the world. Thoughts are on career, popularity, family and possessions.
Awareness, it seems to me is the discovery that there is an observer of this milieu. This awareness strikes in a flash. It seems to me that when you recognize this ghost in the machine, all of a sudden what we do associatively with this world is carried out by 'this being with thoughts' but not by the observer! One observes oneself laughing, weeping, talking and brawling (btw, I had a delectable brawl this week - I think I like brawls).
These three terms, Man, Thought and Awareness are telescopic. Thoughts rest on the body of man and awareness rests on top of that.
In the busy schedule of life, as we all know, years pass quickly and before we realize it a long time has passed. Our minds are always projecting to a different time and place. No advice here, but speculation - but perhaps a way to hold on to time is to give it up, and merge with the awareness that 'we are' and observe our immersion in daily affairs rather than lose ourselves in it.
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