Thread: What exactly is self awareness?

Your self awareness is your conscious knowledge of yourself and your effect on the environment around you.

For example, if you look in a mirror, you probably have conscious knowledge that what you're seeing is the reflection of yourself in the mirror, and that if you move around, your reflection will move around in the same way. Note that this is conscious knowledge, not subconscious, so if you forget these things you are no longer self aware until you remember them.

Knowing that you're dreaming and knowing that you can control the environment around you because you're dreaming are other examples of self awareness. Lucidity is self awareness that you're dreaming.

By trying to increase self awareness, you're trying to gain more working knowledge about yourself or your effect on the environment around you.

By practicing mindfulness, you're already practicing self awareness. Just don't forget your influence on the world you're living in.

Thanks Dolphin.

Another way to think of it is what it's not. Being on autopilot is when you're not being self-aware. We have all had that experience where we are so engrossed in something that we forget what we are doing. You can do some physical action while thinking about something else, and then you suddenly realise that you did it without having to consciously think about it.
The trouble is we are very good at going into autopilot mode, and being truly self-aware is actually quite hard work. If you can regularly become self-aware for short periods, and do that when you are dreaming, you can become lucid.

Thanks for all of the replys. So my method for self awareness is now to constantly focus on my breathing while trying to keep my mind clear and focusing on the environment around me and how I interact with it. Would you guys say this is effective for getting lucid.

I think it's a great idea. It's also my daily practice. But there's something I'd like to add that I've incorporated into the practice. The base idea isn't mine, as i saw it on another video, but the explanation is. When you are looking around observing objects, make sure you are not sub-vocalizing descriptions of the objects. Reach out with your mind and touch them, feel the smoothness, the rough nature, without using metaphors (labels). Just take in the experience of the touch. This will keep you far better focused on the moment, in the now, because it is the injection of metaphor that draws your mind to other topics and away from the moment. Our memory is designed to do this very thing. Memory is set up in chains. You think tree, wood, oh, bat, ball, baseball, oh I wish I were playing baseball right now. Your mind automatically falls into the metaphor trap. Practice reaching out with your mind, your imagined fingers, and rub them over the bark of the tree; purely experience it without naming the feeling. It takes time for this to be natural, but it will help you stay in the now and create, at the very least, far more vivid dream experiences, giving you a greater chance of becoming aware that you are dreaming. Just my perspective.

Thanks Goldenspark and madmagus. U guys helped a lot