Awareness

Awareness is essentially an undefined term referring to a particular kind of immediate experience which may be distinguished from other states of consciousness. Awareness develops with, and is integrally part of, an organismic-environmental transaction. It includes thinking and feeling, but is always based on current perception of the current situation. It includes some intention and directionality of the self toward the world. In its pure form there is a momentary weakening of the self-other barrier and the object of awareness seems momentarily included in the self. A few people seem to experience this condition more or less continuously. The usual content of consciousness for many people, however, is a flow of fantasy-imagery and subvocal speech that is not deeply rooted in ongoing behaviour, but only tangentially related to it. Awareness is distinct from this unfocused reverie. In healthy life it is simply present, paralleling all behaviour. In therapy, however, when awareness develops where it has previously been blocked, it tends to be accompanied by a sense of release of tension and a feeling of increase in energy.

Awareness is distinct from introspection in which the self is split, with one part observing another part as an object, self-consciously. Awareness is the whole self, conscious of that to which the organism is attending. Introspection being relatively detached from ongoing total organismic concern, and being out of touch with the actual environment, can never discover anything very new, but only rearrange and rehash the remembered and hence unnourishing past. Awareness, being in contact with the current environment and organism, always includes something refreshingly new. Awareness is related to emotionally-rooted insight in that the latter is based on an expansion of awareness of an ongoing organism-environment relationship with its associated positive affect and sense of discovery, while intellectual insight lacks this crucial rootedness in the actual.

Awareness develops spontaneously where novelty and complexity of transaction are greatest, and the most possibilities (for good or ill) exist. It seems to facilitate the maximum efficiency by focusing the attention of the individual and concentrating his abilities on the most complex, possibility-loaded, situations. When awareness does not develop at this region of the organism-environment contact boundary, at which an especially important and complex transaction is occurring, something is going wrong. Therapy (of the Gestalt variety) consists of reintegration of attention and awareness.

Awareness is also used in the sense of task awareness or readiness when individuals are oriented to the performance of a task on receipt of some signal, without consciously registering that the instruction has been given.