How to Be Fully Conscious of Your Self

Self-growth involves full consciousness.

Both of your light and darkness. Both of your limitations and potential. Both of your strengths and weaknesses.

Both sides are true for every human being. They co-exist although they oppose each other.

The way to growth is to accept and cultivate this innate paradox of our selves. You approach wholeness when you do so.


Here’s our problem:  we tend to shy away from one or both sides of the truth about us. We invalidate the reality of our selves as a result.

Jon railed at his limitations. His doctors advised him not to go motorcycling anymore after a serious brain surgery. He protested to his wife who’s taking care of him.

He chafed against medical advice, still went on motorcycling at great risk.  In part because his condition reminds him of his mortality or inevitability of physical death.

In Jon’s case, he’s not fully conscious of himself. His paradox. He can deny loss or truth but he can’t control it.

To be fully conscious of your self is accepting the paradoxes and limitations of life and death. It’s to see the whole picture. To neither deny any side. To honestly assess what really is.

As Anais Nin once wrote, “I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.”

You gain by being more deeply conscious of the use of your life and self.