The little baby in the cradle stares back at you as you make faces and funny sounds, and express your love and fondness. Surely the little one feels your emotion of love and care, even if that is in a vibrational sense. The child’s continuous gaze reminds one of something we perhaps know and recognize deeply…we feel the same sense of blissful continuity in the swaying tree and the flowing river; there is a sense of permanence in that baby gaze as compared to all the varying thoughts, feelings and emotions that stir up inside us.

We are aware what happens to our awareness as we grow out of our babyhood, or are we even in the least, ‘aware’? The baby gaze turns more focussed and steady and the child learn’s to identify one thing as different from the other. The child can slowly, around the age of 2, recall most of the experiences gone through, and the brain can register and recall everything as memory gets distinct. The brain develops even more and by the age of 4-5, the child develops cognitive and perceptive abilities to the extent that the human brain has grown to its epitome and has arrived as a full operational system.

And what happens to the ‘awareness’???

The child’s ability to be fully aware and stay in an encompassing witness form to everything around, in a neutral unconditioned way rapidly diminishes with the brain’s growth, and with the heavy pressure of the world around on the child to be object focussed – and further to also constantly indulge in thought processes for discerning happenings in the world around. And for god’s sake, we must be suicidal to call this ‘growing up’, where we completely disconnect with our innate natural ability to ‘be’ a whole living being, negating the natural call of every cell of our body vibrating to the divine play of the Universe.

This is the story of every human being in today’s civilized society…each one of us has been pressurized to turn away from being ‘aware’, early in life, and rather be caught up in a half-minded pattern of thought-ridden consciousness, which is evidently a poor sorry way of living out a human life.

Humans aspire to live this poor life, missing out on the true essence of human life, only because the human world at large has lost the track. Most of the very intelligent and highly ‘so-called’ capable & successful people in this civilized modern world are only conditioned thought-driven brains, who are not anywhere close to living out their true human potential.

Am I saying therefore that the true potential of a human being is to be fully ‘aware’?

What is actually the essence of being human?

Let me approach this question by looking at how some of us turned to the spiritual path, seeking to answer this elemental or essential issue of discovering the meaning of our existence in this human life! Whenever I share the close experience of how I reached the fag end of my wits in the thought-brain driven world, the feeling echoes loud and clear in most like-minded people.

What some of us have had to effectively do is to rewind our life’s movement and unwind many of the patterns that were thrusted on us by the world.

‘Awareness’ connects us to a much larger mechanism in the universe, blossoming our latent skill of a fine intellect and intelligence referred as “Viveka-buddhi” in our scriptures. Going into this awareness mode our being responds completely to situations in a wholesome and wholehearted manner with the ease and spontaneity of the flowing river…

I would say that every human individual has the RIGHT to set right his or her life by connecting to one’s latent nature, and open up the unconditioned ‘Awareness’.

Well, this would be only wish-full thinking for most, and in this thought-brain driven world, beggars cannot be choosers!!

So how does one retract from the state of mind that has been cultivated by the world and slowly return to one’s natural state of living in full awareness.

The process of going back to one’s own true infinite nature of full awareness may be different for each individual – “To each his own path”.

Nevertheless, every individual in his own right has to first and foremost believe that he/she is a living mechanism that is larger, more profound than the thought processes and patterns cultivated over the years. Bringing the thought-brain activity to a halt is not possible in the practical world, but slowing it down consciously is surely a possible way to go. Consciously stopping the pattern of interpreting, deciphering and judging everything around is also a sure step of coming back home. If and when, we will decide to turn our life to the natural way, and be ready to walk the path, the universe will ‘allow’ our wholeness to open up – and re-gift to us what we were always meant to be….

The human is naturally gifted with an innate ability to ‘receive’ the universe with his/her being in totality, and not in limited brain-wave interpretation. In the natural way, with a conscious full awareness, we can live out every moment with ease and spontaneity giving ourselves wholly to the moment, without having to subject ourselves to ‘thinking’.

I would just like to say, to conclude this piece, the human world has always indulged in half-truths, fighting for the limited rights of groups – the right to education, the right to vote in a democracy, the right to gender equality and so forth… and undoubtedly, these have been emerging steps in evolution of mankind. The time has come, as echoed by many sages and seers that now we will as humanity, become aware of our true human potential, and in full unconditioned awareness move closer to living the human life that we truly deserve; a wholesome and complete life our creator meant for us.

by Nitin Orayan For Dia For Life