Bible Stories: In the Beginning...On Self-Awareness and Self-Acceptance
I had always seen the call to a higher consciousness as being unique to Eastern theologies, yet, it was I see now as I finish reading Genesis.
I was introduced to the ideas of self-awareness and self-acceptance through an Eastern religious perspective. Like many young, disaffected Americans, I read Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha and found myself thrown into a Universe of ideas that were at once both novel and familiar at the same time.
In this novel, I was introduced to the idea that the Universe is what it is, reality is what it is, and that we can learn everything we wish to know about the Cosmos and ourselves simply by listening and observing. It is as Carl Sagan once said, “The Cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the Universe to know itself.” We come to know the Universe, and our own selves, by becoming aware and by accepting what our awareness brings us into contact with.
There is an ancient adage: as above, so below. It captures the idea that the Cosmos within us (i.e., our consciousness, soul, internal world) is a reflection of the Cosmos outside of us. As such, by understanding the world within us, we gain understanding of the world about us and, likewise, by understanding the world about us, we gain understanding of the world within us.
That Carl Sagan quote offers the rationale behind this ancient idea. We are children of the Universe and, as such, we are subject to the same laws of the Universe that all other things are as well. So, by understanding our own selves, we are able to understand the laws that dictate the entirety of the Universe and by understanding the Universe, we are better able to understand the laws that dictate the life of our own souls.
Understanding of the Universe comes from the paired practices of awareness and acceptance. Awareness is our ability to bear witness to reality with our conscious self and acceptance is the ability to receive what we witness without resistance. This is the path to gaining true wisdom, to gaining an understanding of what it means to be here, to exist, to be conscious.
Thus, in these ideas, I have learned that self-awareness and self-acceptance are central activities to growing as a person. Self-awareness allows us see ourselves for who and what we truly are. Self-acceptance allows us to receive ourselves without resistance. These two pieces go hand-in-hand: if we are unable to accept ourselves for who we truly are, we will resist being aware; if we are unaware of our own selves, then we will have no opportunity for acceptance.
Our struggles with acceptance of reality and self-acceptance are the easiest to point out. Perhaps you, like me, have at some point looked in the mirror and not liked what you’ve seen - maybe you saw yourself as too fat, too scrawny, too ugly, too something bad. When this happens, we turn our awareness away from ourselves - we let ourselves become absorbed in distractions, distractions that keep our awareness away from ourselves.
Our struggles with awareness and self-awareness can be trickier to name, but we are all generally familiar with them. Emotions represent one realm in which we often fail to be self-aware. Often times, when we get angry, we become anger. We act out in anger. We let anger consume us. Self-awareness arises in that moment when we say, “I am angry”. It is through self-awareness that we can begin to understand and accept our anger and, by virtue of this, put ourselves on a path to act intentionally. Many of us have hurt others and ourselves when we let anger consume us without self-awareness.
Now, I need to connect all of this to Torah, as this is a “Bible Stories” essay, after all. I often think about these themes of self-awareness and wisdom. I have just finished reading Genesis for this year and a passage from the very first chapter jumped out to me. It is a passage many (most?) of us are familiar with:
God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning - the sixth day. (Genesis 1:31)
“God saw all that he had made” - God is self-aware. “…and it was very good” - God is self-accepting. God is the name we have given to the creative, self-aware, self-accepting consciousness of the Universe!
According to this accounting, “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). If we are created in God’s image, then our “God-self” (i.e., our “higher consciousness”), is our own creative, self-aware, self-accepting consciousness.
As I read through Genesis, it occurred to me that “in the beginning” of this story, Jewish mythology establishes self-awareness and self-acceptance as foundations for stepping into a higher consciousness, as central components of what God is. I had taken refuge much of my adult life in Eastern religious ideas yet, here before me, was the words of my own religion speaking these profound truths back to me. I feel deeply blessed in this.
As I read through Genesis, I felt that the entire book was focused on how truly difficult it is for Man to return to their God-selves, to return to self-awareness, to return to self-acceptance. From the Fall of Man to the Death of Jacob, Man struggles to return to self-awareness and to self-acceptance. It is only at the end of Genesis, when Joseph forgives his brothers that the line of Abraham returns self-awareness and self-acceptance.
In second chapter of Genesis, God tells Adam, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.” Of course, as we know, Eve and then Adam both ate from the tree and gained knowledge. They do not “die” in a literal sense, but God curses them to endure the sufferings of life.
I think that the “death” God referred to when eating from the tree of knowledge, is not literal death, but the death of our God-self, the loss of both our self-awareness and self-acceptance. The suffering of life and the knowledge we require to navigate it has a way of keeping us from awareness and acceptance - we languish in our suffering and cling to the knowledge that keeps us alive.
This reminds me of a passage from Joseph Campbell, the mythologist. In The Power of Myth he writes: “‘All life is sorrowful’ is the first Buddhist saying, and so it is. It wouldn’t be life if there weren’t temporality involved, which is sorrow - loss, loss, loss. You’ve got to say yes to life and it as magnificent this way; for this is surely the way God intended it.”
The suffering and sorrows of life have a way of disconnecting us from self-awareness, from self-acceptance, from our God-selves. This is why in Buddhist teaching, they begin by saying that life is sorrowful, that life is suffering - because to be aware and to accept reality is to be aware and to accept suffering. For many of us, we would rather be neither aware nor accept the sufferings of life. As such, suffering disconnects us from our God-selves.
So, too, in the book of Genesis, God curses Man to a life of pain and suffering. The Book of Genesis is not simply the story of the birth of man, but the story of Man returning to the Godly state of self-awareness and self-acceptance that is realized in the life of Joseph, many, many generations after Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge.
But, why does knowledge disconnect us from self-awareness, from self-acceptance? Why is gaining too much knowledge a form of “death”.
As I have discussed in previous essays, Greek philosopher Plato discussed how the written word was a dangerous technology. It is funny to image words being considered a technology, but they are something that Man has created to help share knowledge and ideas with one another.
In Phaedrus, Plato writes: “[People] will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered [in the written word] is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only the semblance of wisdom, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much while for the most part they know nothing. And as men filled not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom they will be a burden to their fellows.”
Words represent shadows that are cast by reality. The word “house” is a shadow of the reality that is a house. The word “happiness” is a shadow of the reality of what it is to experience happiness. When we get too caught up in knowledge captured in words, we become filled with the “conceit of wisdom”, as opposed to true wisdom. We start thinking our words represent reality and we stop tracing a word’s shadow back to its true source.
See, wisdom lives close to that place where consciousness meets reality. Words are a technology (whether they are written or spoken) and so words of wisdom are like a Thesian thread that hold the potential to lead us into true wisdom, which resides in place closer to reality than where words can venture. Without access to true wisdom, words of wisdom represent a maze that one may never escape.
Wisdom is gained through awareness and acceptance. We gain wisdom about the Universe and our own selves through self-awareness and self-acceptance. This does not mean we will always “like” what we see - no, “life is sorrowful” and self-awareness and self-acceptance will ask us to experience and understand that this is true.
And so, in Chapter 1 of Genesis, the foundations of Jewish mythology, Man’s highest potential, Man’s God-self is defined. Man is a Creator, Man is Self-Aware, Man is Self-Accepting. We too easily allow the sufferings of life and the knowledge needed to navigate it pull us away from our highest potential - yet, there is always a path to return. That path is the path of creation, the path of self-awareness, the path of self-acceptance.