Pragmatic Wisdom

Simple lessons for our complicated modern times, drawn from philosophy, religion, and common sense

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Awareness: The Secret to Change

Ben Worrall
Pragmatic Wisdom
Published in
11 min readJul 7, 2024

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An eye of awareness observing itself
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One of the most important requirements for inner work is cultivating ever-more refined levels of awareness.

If you’re reading these words, you already at least have some degree of awareness, but the clarity of this awareness differs from person to person.

A highly trained awareness helps you process experience with greater accuracy. You can view reality through a clearer lens and with more nuance. You see what’s really there, rather than what you have been trained to believe is there. In other words, your perception is more truthful.

On the other hand, if you haven’t developed your awareness, you’re only going to be able to make out silhouettes through a misty window. Your perceptions are not going to be as accurate as you think.

Here’s a statement that’s going to shock you:

99% of your problems in life come from a lack of awareness.

If this doesn’t ring true to you — keep reading. I’ll explain exactly why this is the case.

A Flawed View

Consider your own awareness. It’s mysterious, isn’t it?

You can’t pinpoint exactly how it’s happening, and if you’re honest with yourself, you don’t know what it is that you’re aware of either. You think you do, as you’ve been programmed to categorise and label everything in your environment. But those labels are nothing more than ideas that have been pressed upon raw experience and then used to construct a story.

We take for granted that a clear awareness of reality is a given.

It’s not.

It’s a constructed narrative based on your survival needs.

The human mind is biased towards those parts of reality that aid its survival as a conceptual form. Its labelling of truth will align with what benefits the self, or at least, what the mind believes benefits the self.

The more conceptual certainty you have built up over the years, and the less you have done to clear this baggage, the more self-deceived you will be, while not even…

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Pragmatic Wisdom
Pragmatic Wisdom

Published in Pragmatic Wisdom

Simple lessons for our complicated modern times, drawn from philosophy, religion, and common sense

Ben Worrall
Ben Worrall

Written by Ben Worrall

I share philosophical insights aimed at accelerating personal and collective growth.

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