To be awake, enlightened, and fully conscious is not the typical response most people provide to the question, “Who are you?” Yet, consciousness is an essential part of our human nature. Paraphrasing medical doctor and researcher Larry Dossey, “awakedness” is pure awareness, consciousness, part of the Big Self, the Great Spirit, the universal mind.^[1] Dossey provides evidence from ancient and modern sources that we are more than our individual minds, that we are part of One Mind.^[2] Our conscious awareness is beyond the limits of the body, personality, memory, beliefs, feelings, social roles, and genetics. A greater understanding of this awakened aware consciousness is essential to understanding what it means to listen to the self in the SONG of life.

Wheel of Self Awareness Listening Meditation

The importance and relevance of listening with our conscious awareness is illustrated by Daniel Siegel’s “Wheel of Awareness.”^[3] The wheel is a method to link the different elements of the content of awareness into an integrated whole. The hub of the wheel represents what we can know within awareness. The spokes that go out from the center of the wheel represent our conscious focus of attention as represented by areas or sectors on the rim of the wheel. The sectors are divided into various “senses.” The five senses are the outer world, the sixth sense is the body, the seventh sense represents mental activity, and the eighth sense symbolizes relationships. Finally, awareness can “bend back” on itself, aware of the feeling of awareness.

Listening to Self with Open Focused Attention

Les Femi and Jim Robbins present another perspective of the self using the language of attention. Conscious awareness consists of attention, the contents of attention, and the witness of both.^[5] When brain activity between attention and its contents is “out of phase,” self is experienced as separate from the contents of attention.^[6] Whereas, when brain activity is “in phase,” the experience of a unified whole emerges, and the self becomes “unself-conscious,” that is, the sense of self “disappears.”

The quality of attention called “open focus” allows the self to hold different forms of attention, narrow and diffuse, and objective and immersed. It is possible for the self to hold these different forms of attention simultaneously while also maintaining a flexibility to shift focus depending upon on the situation and intention.^[7] Open focus is an inclusive attention style that takes in multi-sensory information simultaneously. Femi summarizes the profundity of an open focus approach to attention, “When we change the way we pay attention, we gain the power to profoundly change the way we relate to our world on every level–physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually.”^[8]

Listening to Self as an Energy House

Victor Pierau uses the image of an “energy house” for understanding self-awareness and its relationship to listening.^[10] Picture the energy house as a circle divided into four pieces of pie labeled physical, emotional, mental, and “purpose or spirituality,” with our personality as a smaller circle in the center. By paying attention to each of these areas within ourselves (i.e., listening to these aspects of the self), we can gauge how much energy the self has available for listening to others.^[11]

From Ego to Kosmic Perspectives of Listening to Self

Wilber and colleagues^[12] provide another perspective on self-awareness that begins with ego and ends with the Kosmic level of awareness. The ego-centric focus on “me” is the self-absorbed state of consciousness. The next level, called ethnocentric, is the identification with a particular group, tribe, clan, or nation. Another level up, worldcentric consciousness expands self-identity to include all humans. Finally, the highest level of development, encompassing an identification with, and caring for, all sentient beings is called Kosmocentric. Self-awareness potentially contains ego, ethno, world, and Kosmo centric levels of consciousness.

Within these states of self-awareness, there are lines of development that can be depicted on an integral psychograph.^[13] This graph includes several crucial areas of self-awareness and development including cognitive lines, self-related lines (e.g., needs, morals), talent lines (e.g., music, spatial, mathematical), and spiritual, aesthetic, emotional, psychosexual, and interpersonal lines.

Listening to the Authentic Self

What is the authentic self, and is it possible to listen to it? Julia Mossbridge^[15] conceptualizes the individual as having conscious, unconscious or subconscious, and superconscious minds, and a body. The conscious mind is, “. . . a linear, serial-processing logical system that maxes out at four factors . . .” whereas the subconscious mind, “. . . [is] a nonlinear, parallel-processing system that routinely deals with multiple factors and presents its results to the conscious mind without an explanation.” The superconscious mind is the, “. . . source of our connection with the universe  . . . [where universe] includes everything that exists . . . [and has] three critical features: inclusivity, connectivity, and autonomy.” All of these aspects of the mind working together to direct our life is the “authentic self.”

Defining Self Depends On Where You Are

Thus far in listening to the self in the SONG of life, I described several perspectives of the “self” along with activities^[17] designed to develop the capacity to listen to the self. One theme among all the perspectives of listening to the self is that they depend on “where you are.” The Youniverse Explorer is a model demonstrating how the sense of self changes depending on “where you are” as an observer in the Youniverse Explorer.^[18] Beginning with the physical body, it is possible to metaphorically drill down to smaller layers of the self within the body. There is the body’s skin, organs, cells, molecules, and atoms. Smaller than the parts of the atom, there is nothing discernable from current scientific instrumentation. The body’s tiniest basic unit of matter remains a mystery! Conversely, the process can be reversed. We can travel back up to the physical body level defined by its physical outward features such as height, weight, and skin tone. From here, it is possible to travel further outward (upward), away from the body, by powers of ten meters.^[19] Eventually, we imagine ourselves on earth viewed from the perspective of the moon, stars, Milky Way, farther galaxies, and to the edge of the known universe beyond which is a mystery.

From these micro and macro viewpoints in the Youniverse Explorer, the self appears to be contracting and expanding in relation to the center of the witnessing observer. As an observer, Lang notes that there exists a silent void or space from which the person is observing.

Lang provides a simple experiment to demonstrate this phenomenon, which I describe as follows:^[20] Standing or sitting, notice that you cannot see your own face. From your first-person perspective, looking out at the world, you are headless! If you hold your hands out in front of you, clearly, they are there. But if you move your hands slowly back behind your head, your hands “disappear” into the great void, the empty space, the silence. When you bring your hands forward again, the hands arise from the void. Lang describes our “self” as this, “. . . void, the Great Space, Emptiness, the True Self, the Openness here, this Clarity, Stillness, the place I am looking out of, my No-face, my No-head.” This is the private identity that we have for ourselves. It is the core of the self. The self of the SONG of life that we are learning to listen to when we contract and expand ourselves in the Youniverse Explorer.