Awareness as the hinge between consciousness and thought

Without consciousness, we cannot think any thought. Without awareness, we cannot create meaning from our thoughts. Non-aware thinking is random, often problematically emotion-driven, and potentially confusing. Awareness Intelligence is about the intelligence of creating meaning in one’s mentalizing and about the intelligence of self-generating useful thinking through awareness. To become more awareness-intelligent is to shift one’s locus of awareness

• from socio-cultural identification to life’s essential nature,
• from transactional relationships to unconditional love, and
• from forcing one’s success to empowering others and next generations to become healthily thriving human beings too.

Consciousness is like the fire of our soul, and awareness is its fuel. Fire as the fundamental element of consciousness is the nature of life itself; it exists everywhere and in all of us. It just has to be inflamed. The body does not produce consciousness. Awareness, however, is bound to our existence here on earth. Kindled by universal consciousness, thought-energizing awareness makes hour human experience. Awareness-produced thoughts are the heat and light of the soulfire’s flames. Smoking flames of toxic thought come from the impure fuel of unawareness. We can’t stop the kindling nature of our consciousness, nor is it desirable. What matters though is what fuel is burnt, whether it is aware or unaware.

Consequently,

The quantity and quality of thought are determined by the level of awareness it arises from. Increase your awareness, and you lighten up your thinking. Purify your awareness, and you clear up your thinking.

Awareness, in that sense, is directly influencing our cognitive abilities and, whenever we think, our state of mind.

Only when fired up by consciousness can we experience our self and become who we are. Animals and other forms of life are conscious too and able to interact with and inform each other. Plants exchange oxygen for carbon dioxide with us, a necessary process for both of our planetary existences. A shortage or pollution of the substances in circulation informs how organisms react. Like this network of communicating structures, energy is flowing through everything as the ultimate intelligent circulatory system of all life. Such is the fundamental character of consciousness that is the life energy itself. Consciousness is not an end, but rather the energy we need for increasing and sustaining Awareness Intelligence consistently.

Swami Sarvapriyananda, the Hindu Philosopher, Minister and Spiritual Leader of the Vedanta Society of New York used a helpful analogy. Picture any electrical apparatus, like a TV or so. An electrical device does not contain or produce electricity by itself, and a device can exist in idle standby mode. Only when the device is plugged into the network of electrical energy and current is fueled from this outside source, the device will be able to perform its functions. In such a way our brain is fueled by consciousness. I’d like to develop this picture a bit further. Once the device is on, what determines when the device is used for what? The activation of the instrument’s available functionalities beyond the standby modus requires another level of intelligence: a control device. This controller, if used in the best sense of the device and its impact it has on the environment, I call Awareness Intelligence.

A fully functioning and powered device without the control unit would become incapable of performing its intended services. In the same manner would a human being, albeit energized by consciousness, be unable to choose its self-realization without awareness.

Life ensues where there is life. Life in the sense of consciousness is infinite and all-loving source intelligence. Loving consciousness is everywhere the same. European, African, American, and Asian love is all around the world of the same consciousness. And yet there is a shortage of love. Even in the presence of organically living bodies, a lack of love and affection often cannot provide the ground for further life to flourish. Studies from the Austrian-American psychoanalyst René Spitz suggested already in the 1940s that social interactions are essential for child survival. As the mental capacities to become aware of the existence of love still have to develop, the pathway to experience love, for a child, goes through bodily touch. If not given sufficient love and affection, a young child wouldn’t survive even if otherwise fed well. Besides deadly consequences from hormonal and immune system closedowns, mental illnesses, physiological problems, and suffering can be the effects of deprivation of love. Later in life, as love and affection can be experienced through awareness, a solitary life per se doesn’t have to negatively impact one’s psyche nor physical conditions as, for example, many biographies of hermits show. The need for experiencing love, however, remains.

Awareness is a two-sided grid of the reception of inspiration and intuition on the one side, and the emanation of imagination and intention on the other side.

Fully developed, even physically and temporally distanced life can be sensed.

An aware human being can connect to love regardless of the momentary external context.

A lack of such Awareness Intelligence leads, like bodily malnutrition, to spiritual malawareness. Symptoms of malawareness are mental suffering and inwardly or outwardly turned aggressive behavior demanding the food of love the soul needs so desperately. As Eckhart Tolle says, “Thinking without awareness is the main dilemma of human existence.”

Brain activities as studied by neurology are an after-the-fact effect of consciousness; the brain is not the soul. The question then is how we can use the soul’s conscious energy to develop awareness as required for steering our mind. The goal of developing Awareness Intelligence is to enable you and humanity to think without limits and take responsible control of the life you really want, that actually everybody wants, in our world today.

When we plunge into water, we need to adjust to the laws governing the mechanics of swimming. We are still human and not water ourselves, so we have to manage a harmonious interplay. The same is true for the energy of life we are that fell into organic form. Because our organic corps is different from the constant source energy, a sense of separateness of the body emerges. Awareness is needed to realign the structures that hold us prisoners of organic existence with the non-structural wholeness of unbound consciousness. We need awareness for living a wholly human life that is inspired by divine consciousness and lived through the practical use of our biological organism. The mind is the intellectual capability that builds on the undifferentiated consciousness that can be understood as a general receptivity triggering potential thought.

Awareness is like the hinge between consciousness and thought; it has both the qualities of the divine consciousness and the thoughts it generates.

Therefore, human awareness is both the holy spirit of the soul and the self-generated thoughts of the mind that includes ‘thinking about thinking.’ The degree of knowledge about and the way of applying this foundation of human agency is what makes Awareness Intelligence. It is the ability to be aware of and about one’s awareness.

Humans are social beings equipped with the mental capacity of social intelligence whose ultimate enabler is awareness. What is the scope of the definition of Social Intelligence? Does being socially intelligent deploy intelligence to all social forms and levels of humanity? Social Intelligence as applied to individual, organizational, national, and racial purposes, usually ends at some of such outer social perimeters that societies, depending on culture, have created and therefore may never really comprise all humanity. There may be endeavors considering humanitarian aspects, but one can be called socially intelligent without being truly inclusive of the full possible social scope. If we indeed risk not to develop a more comprehensive view of the human species, this might have dramatic outcomes. For whom? For everyone. That’s why Awareness Intelligence is so essential. It comprises the awareness about the awareness of social scope and inclusion as well as the understanding of how to use it to create the attitude required for our and everybody else’s well-being today and in the future.

Concepts of intelligence can and have been used to categorize people and legitimize exclusion. Traditional intelligence concepts tend to represent institutional interests. For example, they measure the so-called logical thinking abilities as required in natural sciences and as demanded by the education systems who’s aim is to ensure the supply of new corporate workers. Awareness Intelligence is not a concept in that sense as it does not halt at any institutional boundaries and does not impose related restricted rationalities; such a macro-awareness consists of the full reality of human life by pointing towards the all-inclusive and infinite, and therefore, always goes beyond mere organizational interests.

General intelligence is considered to be significantly influenced by genetic disposition. There is agreement though, that intelligence types of the like of Social Intelligence are mostly acquired. In other words, tact, sensibleness, and people smartness typically develop in dependency to experiencing rewards and punishments in specific social settings over time. We never meet whole humanity though and so we assume to have seen all that is relevant for us. Our friends, families, relatives, work organizations, friends, religious institutions, nations, and ethnic groups define our social world view. However, if one wants to be genuinely human with all that humankind has to offer, seeing beyond these more or less narrow organizing social concepts seems to be necessary. Only if we care for all humanity, our happiness will be unlimited.

Awareness Intelligence includes the ability to switch with agility between different possible social layers and to see the commonality of all the fights that are fought on any level.

Intelligence, in a sense it is used here, goes deeper than a skill set for motivated behavior in a specific situation. Intelligence is a permanently maintained and applied deep attitude that continually re-defines one’s personality. If a foreign soldier kills a mother or a father, we find it, correctly, of course, terrible. But what about parental gatekeeping and alienation that leave children growing up without parents too? It takes Awareness Intelligence to see the analogy of the same tragedies just happening on different levels of social identity. In both cases, the reason (a defense mechanism and revenge) and sad consequence (a child growing up without a parent) are the same, but the judgment can change depending on the social scope of awareness. It requires sobriety to recognize any aggression, violence, and war on any level as intolerable and to apply humantime critically to any situation, be it on family, firm, communal, national, or any other level.

If your awareness at times lets you feel constrained, barred, and controlled, it’s your human soul that demands to be freed. Your soul wants to be free from delusional changes of forms and see its true nature of all-encompassing and eternal life. Rationally and especially intuitively informed, our mind notices the possibility of employing a broader scope of social intelligence respectively awareness and, as a result, the opportunity to widen the receptivity for more diverse and more profound human experiences. Being awareness-intelligent is to see that everyone and everything exists in the context of all humanity, while ‘seeing’ can arise both from soul-inspired intuition and mind-generated thought.