Dialectic of Consciousness – Manal Al-Hussaini
Manal Al-Hussaini
It often comes to the human mind: Is consciousness a great thing that we possess or a dangerous thing that we carry?
Naturally, we humans often stop in front of ourselves to think about them, from them, and to them with the exhausting question: “What is consciousness?” Is it an exceptional ability that God has distinguished us from all other creatures to realize our existence and wonder about its meaning, or is it a burden that brings anxiety, fear, and a lot of tension about the unknown?
This question contains a distance between the blessing and the burden of awareness. If we liken awareness to an “intellectual flash” that makes a person able to monitor his thoughts and contemplate himself when he feels pain or joy and tastes the beauty of the moment and when he fears the dread of loss more than the loss itself and his feeling of nostalgia for what has passed and anxiety about the unknown.
If it were not for awareness, our lives would have become very easy, like trees, because they live according to their nature that God created for them, without questions about yesterday or the future, and without the burden of perception or even feeling, for they remain the same and have not changed.
Regarding the fact that a person is able to progress through the stages of awareness, he can thus transform his experiences that he went through into “meaning”, his losses that he experienced, whatever they were, into “wisdom”, and his fear of the unknown into “awareness”. If we improve the progression in its stages, and by that I mean “awareness”, we will understand how the greats who came before us and those among us at the present moment of time and those who will come willingly have this gift to create civilizations. Consciousness is not an idea. We can limit it to something, but it is a complex experience that ignites thought in the mind to see beyond the present moment, transcending what is behind it.
One of the paradoxes of awareness is that it makes us think about our existence and makes us know that we are inevitably fleeting, and yet we continue to search for meaning. Perhaps it is the most complex gift among all human gifts that distinguish it from other creatures. It made us innovate, write, create, love, and fear as well. And with all these achievements, the puzzling question still remains after that, “Who am I?” and perhaps “Why am I here?” and the question remains the most important. Maturity: “What is the benefit behind this pursuit?”
Let us agree that striving is merely an external act by asking questions in our minds to understand that it is more like an internal journey on our part to try to understand ourselves, and let its purpose be the reconciliation between what we want and what life imposes on us in a reality that we may not be able to change, and this questioning cannot happen if we are not in the “stage of awareness.”
When we understand this well, striving becomes a tool for understanding meaning, not just an accumulation of experiences, achievements, and many experiences.
The benefit behind our endeavor, which is part of the journey of awareness, is not always necessarily intended to reach the specific goal that we hope for. Rather, it is deeper, as the benefit may be, and this is mostly in the awareness and internal advancement that that same journey gives us.
If it were not for awareness, we would not have felt every step we took and we would not have understood every experience, even if it was small or fleeting and almost trivial. It was undoubtedly part of building our understanding of ourselves and of life as well. Here, striving is a way to live deeply. It goes beyond the fact that we achieve our goals in life to explain it to us with more awareness that every feeling we feel of fear or sadness and perhaps loss has become a lesson about our human awareness into meaning and a pivotal experience. In our lives.
To those who debate whether awareness is a blessing or a burden
I will ask a question:
Is awareness a blessing?
In my opinion, yes, because it opens doors to understanding the beauty of the meaning behind experiences, and I will refute the question: Is awareness a burden? I also think that yes, because we see the facts in all their faces, even if they hurt us.
Therefore, awareness makes us live with a higher sensory feeling, to suffer deeply, to become more human, and here the differences become clear. Whoever lives without awareness is going through the days, and whoever lives consciously is inevitably living those days to benefit from them and create himself.
