SITUATIONAL AWARENESS: JUNGLE OR TEMPLE

Meditation calms down your racing mind, but is not meant to close yourself off from noticing what happens in yourself or depart for a dream in paradise. Meditation is meant to open yourself up and observe everything that happens, with all your senses and energy frequencies.

In that way, moments of meditation substitute the life that was permanently lived by our ancestors. They were constantly alert, always aware of details in their natural environment, with all their senses and energy frequencies relating to nature. For them, like for animals and plants, it was a matter of life or death to stay in contact with the environment.

That state can be called situational awareness. We have largely lost that capacity, at the cost of our health and natural recovery processes. While our urge to survive increasingly lost the need of situational awareness, this loss made us increasingly vulnerable for new diseases. But nowadays, attempts to relearn situational awareness are coming up and prevent those new diseases.

Now, to be certain, meditation was not only borne out of observational or relational impoverishment, or as a substitute for situational awareness. It came to add a second type of awareness, the awareness of awareness, the noticing that we notice.

Perhaps the challenge is to both recreate the old situational awareness for physical health purposes and further develop the consciousness of ourselves for spiritual health purposes, while considering that both processes have lots of inter-linkages.

http://origins.well.org/movie/