can think about and there are things we can’t. Awareness is an outpost at the boundary, something like a monastery in which we study our reflection. Life forms seem to drift towardgreater awareness, but the force behind this is unclear.Studying one’s reflection is fairly safe. It doesn’t compel you to see or act and it has few repercussions.It might lead to insight and action, but that becomes a choice. Self-study is vague and intangible. It offers no guarantee that you’ll learn anything.There are other ways to encounter yourself that are more compelling, that require more of you and havegreater returns. Some of these are sex, addiction, illness, depression, mania, service, sacrifice, and 1
exploration. There are others I ponder but have not tried, and which may also offer paths to some kind of enlightenment such as war, violence, and insanity. Anything that takes things apart gets some credit for the subsequent putting of things back together, but neither redemption nor reassembly is guaranteed.It appears to me—from watching others and from my own experience—that there is no single path to full awareness. But more than that, no one path is sufficient. One needs to follow several paths and gainoverall views from several vantage points. There is more to become aware of than any one personality can express.To stretch the idea to its limit, there is no one personality from which the full scope of one’s awareness can be seen. At least, not within what we view as the scope