We are constantly exhorted to become more aware every moment. We are asked to deal with every situation, person, and object with awareness.
But did we realise that our awareness is always influenced by our biases, emotions and memories? This gave me an idea.
When we shoot a picture on our mobile phone, we can edit the image using the same camera app in most cases. This editing is like applying awareness to our perceptions! See a typical edit screen in the image above.
There is an analogy on each aspect here:
1. Crop - we are selective in our awareness, we never see the whole picture.
2. Rotate - our biases cause a subtle change in reality so what we see is somewhat rotated from reality, often we see it upside down!
3. Exposure - this aspect determines how much concentration we have in awareness.
4. Contrast - we always add an extra emphasis to distort our awareness of reality by comparison with something else or someone else. This is unfair to reality.
5. Saturation - we react to a thing by making a molehill into a mountain. This increased colouring is nothing but our samskaras reacting with reality.
6. Warmth - this is emotional attachment to things or people. So never is our awareness truly objective.
7. Highlights - we always pick some elements in a thing - for example some words hit us and we ignore others. No two people therefore hear the same thing.
8. Shadows - either ignorance or insensitivity leaves a lot of our awareness in the dark about reality. Everything in life has shadows that speak to us. We only choose to not become aware of it. As they say, "listen to the silence between words."
So awareness is a lot like post- processing of an image!
