Awareness 44

The unaware life is a mechanical life. It’s not human, it’s programmed, conditioned. We might as well be a stone, a block of wood. In the country where I come from, you have hundreds of thousands of people living in little hovels, in extreme poverty, who just manage to survive, working all day long, hard manual work, sleep and then wake up in the morning, eat something, and start all over again. And you sit back and think, “What a life.” “Is that all that life holds in store for them?” And then you’re suddenly jolted into the realization that 99.999% of people here are not much better. You can go to the movies, drive around in a car, you can go for a cruise. Do you think you are much better off than they are? You are just as dead as they are. Just as much a machine as they are—a slightly bigger one, but a machine nevertheless. That’s sad. It’s sad to think that people go through life like this.

People go through life with fixed ideas; they never change. They’re just not aware of what’s going on. They might as well be a block of wood, or a rock, a talking, walking, thinking machine. That’s not human. They are puppets, jerked around by all kinds of things. Press a button and you get a reaction. You can almost predict how this person is going to react. If I study a person, I can tell you just how he or she is going to react. With my therapy group, sometimes I write on a piece of paper that so-and-so is going to start the session and so-and-so will reply. Do you think that’s bad? Well, don’t listen to people who say to you, “Forget yourself! Go out in love to others.” Don’t listen to them! They’re all wrong. The worst thing you can do is forget yourself when you go out to others in the so-called helping attitude.

This was brought home to me very forcibly many years ago when I did my studies in

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psychology in Chicago. We had a course in counseling for priests. It was open only to priests who were actually engaged in counseling and who agreed to bring a taped session to class. There must have been about twenty of us. When it was my turn, I brought a cassette with an interview I had had with a young woman. The instructor put it in a recorder and we all began to listen to it. After five minutes, as was his custom, the instructor stopped the tape and asked, “Any comments?” Someone said to me, “Why did you ask her that question?” I said, “I’m not aware that I asked her a question. As a matter of fact, I’m quite sure I did not ask any questions.” He said, “You did.” I was quite sure because at that time I was consciously following the method of Carl Rogers, which is person-oriented and nondirective. You don’t ask questions. and you don’t interrupt or give advice. So I was very aware that I mustn’t ask questions. Anyway, there was a dispute between us, so the instructor said, “Why don’t we play the tape again?” So we played it again and there, to my horror, was a whopping big question, as tall as the Empire State Building, a huge question. The interesting thing to me was that I had heard that question three times, the first time, presumably, when I asked it, the second time when I listened to the tape in my room (because I wanted to take a good tape to class), and the third time when I heard it in the classroom. But it hadn’t registered! I wasn’t aware.

That happens frequently in my therapy sessions or in my spiritual direction. We tape-record the interview, and when the client listens to it, he or she says, “You know, I didn’t really hear what you said during the interview. I only heard what you said when I listened to the tape.” More interestingly, I didn’t hear what I said during the interview. It’s shocking to discover that I’m saying things in a therapy session that I’m not aware of. The full import of them only dawns on me later. Do you call that human? “Forget yourself and go out to others,” you say! Anyhow, after we listened to the whole tape there in Chicago, the instructor said, “Are there any comments?” One of the priests, a fifty-year-old man to whom I had taken a liking, said to me, “Tony, I’d like to ask you a personal question. Would that be all right?” I said, “Yes, go ahead. If I don’t want to answer it, I won’t.” He said, “Is this woman in the interview pretty?”

You know, honest to goodness, I was at a stage of my development (or undevelopment) where I didn’t notice if someone was good-looking or not. It didn’t matter to me. She was a sheep of Christ’s flock; I was a pastor. I dispensed help. Isn’t that great! It was the way we were trained. So I said to him, “What’s that got to do with it?” He said, “Because you don’t like her, do you?” I said, “What?!” It hadn’t ever struck me that I liked or disliked individuals. Like most people, I had an occasional dislike that would register in consciousness, but my attitude was mostly neutral. I asked, “What makes you say that?” He said, “The tape.” We went through the tape again, and he said, “Listen to your voice. Notice how sweet it has become. You’re irritated, aren’t you?” I was, and I was only becoming aware of it right there. And what was I saying to her nondirectively? I was saying, “Don’t come back.” But I wasn’t aware of that. My priest friend said, “She’s a woman. She will have picked this up. When are you supposed to meet her next?” I said, “Next Wednesday.” He said, “My guess is she won’t come back.” She didn’t. I waited one week but she didn’t come. I waited another week and she didn’t come. Then I called her. I broke one of my rules: Don’t be the rescuer.

I called her and said to her, “Remember that tape you allowed me to make for the class? It was a great help because the class pointed out all kinds of things to me” (I didn’t

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tell her what!) “that would make the session somewhat more effective. So if you care to come back, that would make it more effective.” She said, “All right, I’ll come back.” She did. The dislike was still there. It hadn’t gone away, but it wasn’t getting in the way. What you are aware of you are in control of; what you are not aware of is in control of you. You are always a slave to what you’re not aware of. When you’re aware of it, you’re free from it. It’s there, but you’re not affected by it. You’re not controlled by it; you’re not enslaved by it. That’s the difference.

Awareness, awareness, awareness, awareness. What they trained us to do in that course was to become participant observers. To put it somewhat graphically, I’d be talking to you and at the same time I’d be out there watching you and watching me. When I’m listening to you, it’s infinitely more important for me to listen to me than to listen to you. Of course, it’s important to listen to you, but it’s more important that I listen to me. Otherwise I won’t be hearing you. Or I’ll be distorting everything you say. I’ll be coming at you from my own conditioning. I’ll be reacting to you in all kinds of ways from my insecurities, from my need to manipulate you, from my desire to succeed, from irritations and feelings that I might not be aware of. So it’s frightfully important that I listen to me when I’m listening to you. That’s what they were training us to do, obtaining awareness.