awareness and common sense  

Your Human PotentialYour Common Sense.

A Sense is an awareness through which Life and the external world is perceived and interpreted to give the individual a meaning for the experience.

How many times were we told as children "Use your Common Sense" - or "You don't have any Common Sense".

Well - what do those two statements mean to the child who hears them .. and also to the adult who uses the phrase?

  • As a child, you used your "Common Sense" but you did not have the words to understand how your were able to just "know" something - even when the words were not spoken.
  • As an adult, we know that there are the basic senses of hearing, sight, touch, taste and smell. Of course, we have forgotten about the so-called "extra senses" unless we have become involved in some metaphysical pursuit.

Even taking the just the five normal senses of sight, sound, taste, smell and feeling, each one contributes to an overall perception of your experience in any inter-relationship between you and life. 

Each one of these senses is either pleasant to you or arouses some reaction. These reactions come from some unconscious memories - located in your body.

The common sense or awareness (in that part of the mind beyond the conscious thinking process) looks at the reactions to each of these senses and decides whether the "average" input from the senses (the Common Sense) is either a pleasant one or one that you will react against.

Your Common Sense is a Transpersonal Awareness - beyond any personality or mask that you (or others) may think you are.

( In some cases, there can be a Dominant Sense which can over-ride or bias the "Common Sense". Maybe it is a smell that you have been programmed into a complete aversion to - maybe it is a visual image - maybe it is ... )

- and -

All of this happens well before your thinking mind (which has the words to translate, interpret and "consciously understand" the experience) is even aware that the integral you (the whole of you that you see when you stand and look at yourself naked in the mirror) has well and truly summed up the situation and sent a series of programmed responses to every other part of the body except that part of you (what you call mind) that thinks it knows better.

This is called your reaction - and, because it has already happened before the mind is aware there was something to react to, there is very little that you can think that you can do about it.

- now -

If your awareness or common sense says "This person - because of the smell, taste, and the pitch of the voice coming with the words - is telling me lies", what is going to happen to the rest of your body (and its senses) if the mind decides that, for some reason, it is appropriate to believe this person and go against the "Common Sense" response?

When a person is not speaking with the conviction and integrity of the "Common Sense", there is no synergy behind the words and there is a hollowness to them. The linear thinking mind of the listener might like the words because they satisfy some need ..

- but -

Unless a person is speaking from the "Common Sense", the pitch of the voice, the smell given off from the body,  - even the body language - betrays the speaker's integrity.

As a child you were aware of this when your parents, peers and society used words to try to condition your thinking mind into believing that you didn't have any common sense.

Buried down under the repression of those same conditioned thoughts, you have the memory of all of your sensory stimuli and how they responded to what you were being taught to believe .. even to the point that some of the sensory organs became imprinted with non life-supportive responses ..

The five senses we sometimes begrudgingly admit to (when it suits us) are only the beginning of our awareness of life and the world around us .. and, consider for a moment, that the conditioning of these sensory perceptors started - for you, in this body - from the moment the sperm united with the egg in your mother's womb.

This provided the environment into which the seed (which has grown up to become you) was sown.

Thus, Common Sense is the governing awareness ..
the integration of all the individual sensory awareness's
through which Life and the external world
is given a meaning to the individual.

"Awareness - Your Common Sense" was written, published and copyright by Transpersonal Lifestreams, Hobart, Tasmania. The url of this page is http://www.anunda.com/about/common-sense.htm and it was updated May, 2005





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