Fully Aware

It was a wake-up, for sure. I suddenly became aware that I was looking out at the receding highway through the back windows of an ambulance. Somehow, I wasn’t surprised; but I didn’t know how I got there. So I asked. I got a short explanation.

For the next hours in the hospital emergency and critical care unit, awareness was still an illusive and elusive thing. I thought I was aware. Then I realized I hadn’t been. Then I thought I had a grip on it. Then I realized it had escaped me again.

I have never been as aware of how unaware I can be, until I reflected on my stages of awareness and consciousness after my head injury, now about three months ago.

My Recent Stages of Awareness:

1. Normal: I ate breakfast, went to do some work with a friend, and had not the smallest clue that I had the potential to lose consciousness without warning
2. None: After falling backwards, flat onto the concrete, I had no awareness, no movement, little sign of life. I cannot now recall any of this stage.
3. Non-voluntary: (sticking with Ns for now) I started to act without any realization of what had just happened. I sat up. I pulled myself to my feet. I told my work partner to get his hand off my bleeding head. I started to walk, having no idea where I wanted to go. I cannot recall any of this stage, to this day. Awareness was not full consciousness. I could not even apply reason and logic to that level of awareness. I asked questions about reality, but the answers didn’t register and didn’t seem to increase my awareness.
4. A wake-up: Suddenly, my level of awareness could take in my surroundings, and what I saw with my eyes began to make me ask questions to try to fill in gaps in my awareness. What I saw with my eyes didn’t correspond with where I thought I had been. What I felt with my nerves didn’t correspond with what I had last felt in my other world of greater awareness.
5. Ongoing: With every sleep period, with every conversation, with every professional assessment of my condition my self-awareness grew. And continues to grow. Only a small percentage of this was achieved by myself; most of it was given to me by the community around me, caring for me.

Scientists and other experts have helped us understand what consciousness means to humans, and how consciousness separates us from animals that have a very different level of consciousness, of self-awareness.

As a result of my recent experiences with the extremes of self-awareness, I have a new appreciation—along with some updated understandings—for concepts like ego and self-assessment, fulfillment and satisfaction, purpose and achievement.

Imagine the results if, in each of these stages of consciousness and awareness, I had been on my own—all alone. To me, this is the supreme and lasting lesson in the matter of consciousness and self-awareness.

I feel that my progression through the stages of awareness from “normal” to a radically re-educated, ongoing growth in self-awareness corresponds directly to our spiritual journey and self-consciousness.

To me, it boils down to two helpful concepts:
First, I can’t be trusted to provide my own self-assessment. That’s because I’m not fully self-aware or completely self-conscious. I don’t even know if I’m normal, or not, at any given point. (Some of you have been wishing to say that to me for a long time, eh?)

The Bible helps us to think about this: We are warned that we tend to lie to ourselves whenever we find that helpful. Jeremiah 17:9 says that “the heart” is deceitful. To bring some balance to that, “the heart” is also helpful and trustworthy: 1John 3:20-21, “If our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God…” It’s not one or the other, it’s “both and.”

Secondly, any assurance that self-consciousness and awareness are accurate comes through community, through interdependence, through committed relationships. The Church is not there to simply affirm my self-awareness, or support my level of consciousness.

My family and community are much like the ambulance attendants and medical professionals who were dealing with me: they wanted my self-assessment, but they didn’t fully trust that; they intervened and acted on their own observations; they connected me to others who could help determine who I really was, at that time.

Ongoing. If I wish to live life to its fullest, I must find ways to improve the accuracy of my awareness, of my consciousness. Otherwise, I will work toward goals that actually bring me to more harm than good. The only way that accuracy will improve is if I practice partnership with God as the ultimate source of consciousness—and with the Church as the living community in which I become increasingly self-aware.