In 2006, I founded the John P. Connolly Institute, the first center devoted to the study of the relationship between the self-awareness of a person and their conscious life. I’ve been researching this in depth ever since.
Connolly’s book, Consciousness and Awareness, is one of the most profound and influential books on personal consciousness ever written, and in it he states that our awareness is what we are. It is not who we are, but what we are. He argues that our awareness is what we are in our own unique way. So our awareness is a measure of our own consciousness. He says our consciousness is both a measure of who we are, as well as the means by which we are aware.
The reality is that our awareness isn’t separate from us in any way. In fact, our awareness is the very thing that is us. Our awareness is our unique way of being, and because it is so distinct from us, it can be both who we are and also who we are aware of. We are aware in the sense that we are aware of ourselves, and ourselves are aware in the sense that we are aware of ourselves. Our awareness is our awareness, not our awareness.
It’s also very important to remember that we’re able to be aware in more than one way at the same time. We can be aware of ourselves at the same time as we can be aware of everything else. In fact, the only way to tell if you’re aware of yourself is to ask yourself if you can be aware of everything else.
I think we are very aware of ourselves in the way that we are aware of someone we know very well. I think we are aware of ourselves in the way that we are aware of ourselves (because we are very aware of ourselves).
Well, it depends on how you define awareness. If you define awareness as being able to know ourselves, that would be a pretty good way to describe us. But if you define awareness as being able to know everything else, then I can’t really fault you for trying.
I think this is one of those things where we do have to be really careful about defining awareness. I think that when we try to define it, we get caught up in the definition and we forget what the definition is actually saying. I mean, the definition of what awareness means might be that we are aware of ourselves. But we forget to say what we mean by that. We forget the part about being aware of everything else. I think that’s very, very bad.
The problem we have with anything that uses “awareness” is that it can be very misleading. We can be aware of ourselves and be totally oblivious to everything around us. That can sound like we lack awareness in the eyes of the world. But we are aware of ourselves in the eyes of the person we are talking to and the person we are talking to is not aware of us.