Self-awareness Vs. Conciousness

[Yang Noctus]

What is the difference between growing in self-awareness and becoming more concious?

For example, if you meditate mindfully and observe your thoughts, emotions. Do you become more self-aware or more concious, or both?

What is the connection between them?

[Prabhaker]

Consciousness is a quality of the mind, awareness is the transcendence; it is going beyond the mind. Mind, as such, is the medium of duality, so consciousness can never transcend duality. It is always conscious of something, and there is always someone who is conscious. Awareness means the state of no mind.

[kurt]

3 hours ago, Yang Noctus said:

What is the difference between growing in self-awareness and becoming more concious?

For example, if you meditate mindfully and observe your thoughts, emotions. Do you become more self-aware or more concious, or both?

What is the connection between them?

Consciousness and awareness are the same thing.  But they are not functions of the human mind like we think (so they don't grow in the conventional sense).  Self awareness is being conscious of your True Nature, which is beyond names and forms.  Consciousness is existence itself.  Growth is a form, consciousness is prior to form, the form of growth depends on consciousness (existence), so we dont grow in awareness or consciousness, because awareness and consciousness is all that exists.  

Another way to say it is growth is something that happens IN consciousness because growth cannot BE without existence.

Your true nature is not something that you can grasp or experience, it must be pointed out to you from the outside because you are not able to understand what it means with the instruments you have at your disposal, your mind and intellect.  You won't be able to experience your True Nature, because experience is dependent on your True Nature.  That would be like trying to see your own eyeball.  

Experience depends on existence, so the only way you are going to know your True Nature (Self-awareness) is through understanding your True Nature.

Edited September 25, 2016 by kurt

[FindingPeace]

I think 'awareness' and 'consciousness' get used synominously at times but they aren't the same thing.

'Consciousness' is another word for your experience of life. When you are in deep sleep you have no experience of anything, you are unconscious. When you are awake you are experiencing sensory inputs as well as thoughts, feelings and emotions. Even during dreaming there is a conscious experience. Consciousness is the phenomenom that gives you the experience of life, The minds eye, sounds, sight, touch, thoughts, emotions etc all are experienced within consciousness.

'Awareness', on the other hand, is another way of describing attention. Awareness is sort of the mechanism that focusses what we are conscious of at any givem moment. You can be aware of what you are seeing, or hearing, or thinking and feeling. But usually you can only be aware of specific things at a time, not everything at once. Also, there are things that we rarely give our attention to because we are not used to it or have never done so - like thoughts.

So raising awareness is basically training our attention on to things that we usually don't. LIke thoughts. Or certain psychological behaviours. Or aspects of life or other experiences. Meditaion and mindfullness raise awareness of the present moment and the nature of thoughts. It teaches us to more frequently put our attention on to these things.

Higher awareness is effectively learning to give more attention to aspects of life that we didn't previously. By doing so we see things that we didn't previously and in time we may have realisations or epiphanies and take corrective action to certain things in our lives. Ultimately our perception of life will change because we are becomming more aware of things within our consciousness, which will lead to a different perception overall.

Perception is a subjective experience that is reliant on our level of awareness. Greater awareness leads to a more fuller perception. This leads to a greater understanding of reality and a healthier mindset that leads to more authentic and healthier motives.