Awareness is a sort of ability to perceive, to feel, or to become conscious of events, objects, thoughts, emotions, or sensory patterns. The aware definition varies in different perspective. There are different types of awareness including consciousness, qualia, self, sentience, agency etc.
- Consciousness is the awareness or perception of something by an individual.
- Qualia is the internal as well as subjective component of sense perceptions which arise from stimulation of the senses by phenomena.
- Self incorporates an individual’s conscious and unconscious aspects, their personality, cognitions or thoughts or feelings. The self has different facets that help in making up integral parts of it, for example, self-awareness, self-esteem, self-knowledge, self-perception etc.
- Sentience is also an ability to feel, perceive or experience subjectively. Having senses means making something sentient, or able to touch, smell, communicate, see, or hear.
- Agency is the subjective awareness of initiating, executing, as well as controlling an individual’s own volitional actions in the world.
Awareness is Essential
Awareness has become a basic requirement for human survival. Since the time an individual takes birth on this earth, there is only one thing that never changes till the time he or she dies, that is his/ her constant companion who is none other than but himself/ herself. An individual lives with himself in the entire life time. Since the time a person recognizes that he can think or make decisions for himself, he starts creating his own world.
In case, an individual misses out realization of having a sole right over his brain at the correct time, it further leads to creation of a fictional world where he feels he is fine with being arrogant. While living like this, people do not introspect and reflect on themselves. In case, someone asks them how did you end up like this?, even they do not know its answer because they never keep a tab on their steps.
Usually, people who are not self- aware tend to take whatever given to them and they will do what other will say to them to do. They do not have any idea or even know about themselves and thus they never understand others. These type of people are not capable of empathizing and lead their life in a specific set way. Living a flexible life is not their cup of tea.
To become self-aware means to have some knowledge of the following:
- how other people perceive you
- how you affect other people
- how and why you react in certain ways to particular situations
An individual who is not self-aware cannot tell if he is annoying another person, or boring them, or even causing distress.
This concept is different from people who just do not care about anything. They might have self-awareness, but they lack in sympathy and empathy.
Everyone wants at least a person in their life to understand them properly and support them on every aspect of life but in case, an individual is not self aware, he does not even know himself then how can he expect that someone else will understand him completely.
As we all know a person can come very close to understanding other person but knowing yourself is the hardest. An individual should never stop knowing himself, be it with introspection, or by mistakes or by experiences. Self awareness is the key element of harnessing your full potential, of achieving things greater than yourself and leading a happy life.