This is a very peculiar (for me), meandering post. There's something important here. I'm just not quite sure yet what it is.
"If
only (company x) knew what (everyone in company x) knew", goes the
lament of many organizations that have tried to implement Knowledge
Management. My sense is that the problem is more fundamental than that:
We're not aware of what we're not aware of.
Case
in point: I have started a routine to check my posture, breathing,
hydration and state of mind, and to do a couple of simple stretching
exercises, once an hour. To remind myself, I have set my watch to
'beep' once at five minutes to each hour. I've been pretty diligent at
doing this, but not once have I not
had to correct my posture and breathing. For a few minutes every hour,
I'm aware. As soon as I go back to whatever I was doing, I cease to be
aware and quickly revert to bad habits. I am incorrigibly unaware
of my body's subconscious actions, my state of mind (including the
stress that manifests itself in insidious ways in my body), and my
disconnectedness to the 'real' world, whenever I am 'living inside my
head' (which is most of the time, at least when I'm conscious).
There are many other things we're not aware of not being aware of:
- Our biases,
- Our habits (good, bad and nervous),
- Our inattention and insensitivity to others,
- Our inability to comprehend others' worldviews and hence appreciate their beliefs, thinking and feelings,
- The sixteen million bits of subconscious data our bodies process every second,
- Subtle changes in our mood, our health, our sensory and emotional sensitivity.
As Stewart & Cohen argue in Figments of Reality, we are a complicity of the separately-evolved creatures in our bodies organized for their
mutual benefit i.e. we are an organism. And our brains, our
intelligence, awareness, consciousness and free-will, are nothing more
than an evolved, shared, feature-detection system jointly developed to
advise these creatures' actions for their
mutual benefit. Our brains, and our minds (the processes that our
neurons, senses and motility organs carry out collectively) are their information-processing system, not 'ours'.
So
when it comes to being aware of what we're not aware of, 'we' really
have little say in the matter: Our bodies' collective organisms adapt
as they see fit to external forces, changes and stimuli, and have no
inclination to consult 'us' about it. Our minds are in their service.
In Straw Dogs, John Gray calls the belief that we as individuals and as a species have
control of ourselves and our world The Deception.
We labour under an error. We act
in the belief that we are all of one piece, but we are able to cope
with things only because we are a succession of fragments. We cannot
shake off the sense that we are enduring selves, and yet we know we are not.
This
conceit of ourselves as separate, enduring selves, apart from others
and from 'the environment' and under 'our' control, is hard to give up.
If we concede that it is an illusion, a falsehood, we are left with the
worst of both worlds: We have little real 'free will' (control or
authority over ourselves) yet we still have responsibility for our
actions (and inactions), since 'we' as organisms, watery bags of skin,
are in turn integral parts of the larger organism that is
all-life-on-Earth (what I call Gaia) and are hence responsive and
responsible to 'us-all'.
This seems profoundly unfair. As
wonderful as the gift of life is, responsibility without authority is a
steep price to pay for it. If our bodies or our instincts or something
in our subconscious drives us to madness, to sudden horrific knee-jerk
violence, to infidelity, to procrastinate, to suicide, to substance
addiction, to respond to stress by 'making ourselves ill', or other
'unconscionable' behaviour, why should we be held responsible and
accountable for it when 'we' were unable to do anything else?
The
answer is that 'we' do have some influence over what our watery bag of
skin and organs does. Some of us need no alarm clock -- we simply
'tell' ourselves that we need to wake up at 6 a.m. and somehow we do. A
couple of years ago when I was recovering from back spasms, my physio
'taped me' into a proper posture, and until the tape was removed, my
body adopted such a posture instead of the stooped, slouched one it had
practiced for nearly fifty years -- every time 'it' tried to go back to
that bad posture, the tape told 'me', and I told 'it', to resume proper
posture, and 'it' obeyed.
But for the most part, our attempt to
command and control our bodies and change our behaviour is as futile as
our culture's attempt to command and control and change the external
environment of which we are a part.
Things happen the way they do for a reason, and as Pascal said, "the
heart has reasons of which our reason knows nothing". And just as the
answer to most of the world's most intractable, complex, social and
environmental problems is to achieve a deep understanding of why and
how they have arisen, and adapt ourselves (Let-Self-Change) and work
with the rest of humanity (and Gaia) to exert, from the bottom-up, such
influence as we can, the answer to working with,
instead of against, our bodies, our instincts and our subconscious (and
our emotions, which manifest the tension between our rational and
visceral 'selves'), is probably to understand them, Let-Self-Change to
adapt to them, accept them, and go with them. Even when, like teenage
children, 'they' act foolishly, irrationally, in self-defeating ways.
They are independent of 'us' and they do what they must.
We
need to give 'them', and 'ourselves', a break. 'They' will learn,
probably far more quickly and effectively than 'we' will, and, if we're
wise, we'll pay attention and learn with 'them' and from 'them'. This
is what might be called 'ecological consciousness', and it applies
equally to the cosmos within us and the cosmos all around us. 'We' are
a part of both, and fighting 'them', as if they were apart, 'other', is
in every sense of the word self-defeating. This is not a matter of
forgiveness, or self-forgiveness, or 'salvation', but rather integral
understanding, letting go, letting be, letting come. It's a part of
re-becoming a part, of re-belonging.
The
prerequisite for Let-Self-Change is Let-Self-Be-Aware. That includes
becoming more aware of what we are not, and probably cannot be, aware
of, what we cannot hope to understand. And knowing that we're not
aware, and being aware that sometimes we're not aware of not being
aware, is OK too. There is a reason for that. It's bigger than all of us, and we're all in this together.
Photo from the Ontario SPCA.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
