A bit more on Awareness

AWARENESS
Well, the fact is that almost all of us remain almost entirely unaware of what is really going on around us. Its a product of our minds function and its entirely normal...

In reality there is just so much going on (even when nothing is happening) that we can not possibly manage to take it all in. The amount of information that is continually available to us through our senses is literally "mind bogglingly" large and it is one of the main functions of our brain to "filter" all that information.
It is called "abstraction" and it is a key function of the mind to prepare the incoming information and "format" it in such a way that the "Reason" part of the mind can use it (to compare with things) . Absolutely everything that comes in through the senses is abstracted by comparisons with expected inputs and then differences are compared to special cases (ouch that hurts or mmmm, I like that etc.) and only things that are outside of the "automated handling" patterns we have built percolate up to the conscious level...everything else is done by "autopilot".

This abstraction process can go through many many layers of processing before the automatic part of the mind is done with it....
For example, I bet not one of you even hesitated as your eyes scanned over the word "mind".
You instantly knew what I meant. But the brain had taken the visual images from the retina, abstracted the black and white shapes, decided they were letters, recognized which ones from the alphabet, assembled the sequence of letters, recognized the word, accessed the associated meanings and finally decided which one to apply in the context of the other words in the sentence.
Like I said, it basically needs to be this way or we would drown in information and be unable to do anything.

But, our mind is so good at this that far more than need be, is automatically handled. The truth is that we are not really looking that hard and "near enough is good enough" seems to be the rule in use - It makes our lives easier :)
But, in fact, in many ways I don't think it does. It traps us in our behaviors. It stops us seeing the patterns in things. It stops us from detecting what is really going on and what it means and what actually matters to us!

And that's where the discernment part matters. If we don't use the incredible ability of our mind to be rational and to decide things then we may as well just be sheep ... and most of us are! We have the power to take control of our lives but we just don't bother (look at the voter turn out in elections in the USA for example).
If, we pay attention, we will see that that abstraction process is misleading us a great deal of the time. Near enough is not good enough!
In particular if we pay attention to how we ourselves behave, and what we are feeling and what thoughts pop up in various situations we will get an amazing new insight into our selves (That's whats been happening for me anyway).
That insight gives us the power to change our selves as well as to see why things don't go the way we want or the way we expect (abstraction has been misleading us with the wrong expectations). We will also begin to see more subtle patterns in the way the world works. Once we see these things, we can start to work WITH them rather than against them as we have been doing... This makes the world far easier to navigate, and actually far more predictable than it was for us before...

And this will all make us much happier people, and that's the point :)