A great part of our spiritual journey relies on awareness. Awareness is the trigger of our inner questioning. If someone or something bothers us, our awareness will be shaken and will cause a questioning process: Why does it bother me? Without it, our consciousness would be covered with a veil of ignorance. To change anything, we must first notice it. This awareness can be described on three levels. The first is to realize something after it happened. For example, after having completed a meal, we could realize that we have eaten too much. It applies in all spheres of our lives, and the realization can come a few minutes afterward or several years later. The second level of awareness is to realize one, or several elements of an event at the very moment it occurs. Let us take, for example, an insult from someone. While this person is insulting us, we could feel our ego arise, ready to fight.
The third and final level is to realize something before it occurs. If we use once more the example of eating, before even starting to eat, we could ask ourselves: “Am I really hungry?” And if hunger is not felt: “Why was I going to eat then?”
Once these levels of awareness are mastered in every aspect of our lives, we then become our own witness. This witnessing state gives us freedom. The freedom to develop our spiritual maturity, to change habits and have a real impact on the outside world while the world has none on our inner being.