Positive and Negative Types of Awareness
There exist in our culture tropes about both positive and negative awareness: in some liberating moment we awaken and it is sublime transcendence, or in some pitched moment of stress we cannot stop thinking of the minutiae of our selves and it is catastrophic (we trip, stumble, stutter, fall).
Some classes and examples, positive and negative, of awareness:
Of the body: one slides under one’s cool, clean sheets at night and feels the muscles of one’s legs stretching out, the body uncoiling from the day’s motion as sleep approaches; though one is preparing to drift off, one’s body seems suddenly awake, announcing its sensations; every inch of skin feels, and feels good.
But at another moment one feels the heaviness of the legs and the feet failing to clear one another as one strides towards the front of a crowded room to begin speaking, the body cumbersome and obstinate in the face of attention, suddenly incapable of smooth coordination or grace; every part of the body is over-attended to, disconnected, and rebellious.
Of the mind: in a moment of the day, the mind clears and one hears the space in the music playing, spacious emptiness between the chords which one may fill with emotive resonances or which one may leave empty and open; as this happens, an undisturbed memory never-before recalled comes forward, and one has the sense that one’s mind, freed by occupancy in the present, is playing, playing with sounds and recollections and impressions; and one is happy to be alive.
Another time one feels one’s mind accelerating, speeding away into the unformed and uncontrollable future, modeling scenarios like a network news anchor interested in inflating ratings with dire, unlikely potentialities; one feels one’s efforts to reign in the mind become part of the mind, one’s response to anxiety become anxiety (or one’s rejection of depression transform into depression), and one falls helpless below the mind’s furious obsession with time that does not exist: past, future.
Variables between positive and negative awareness: Is one sensing as a subject or an object? Is one thinking of oneself or being oneself? Is one in the present or fighting beyond it?
