What is curious awareness?
Curiosity is the urge and desire to understand about the world, the people around us, how it works and our history. It can be focused towards the external or turned inwards towards our depths and spirituality whether that is source or soul. There is no better example for this type of awareness than a young child asking why repeatedly, never tiring in their thirst for knowledge, each question sparking a dozen more, they are like sponges soaking up information and new experiences. It is a state of astonishment with the world that somehow adults seem to lose, we seem to have an amazing ability to get use to anything, even the everyday miracle of life and that by a bizarre sequence of extraordinary events and coincidences, it was able to arise in the first place and actually did so on a big rock circling an obscure star in a perfectly ordinary Galaxy.
Just the sheer number of physical characteristics that our universe has in the first place to allow life to exist even in theory is extraordinary. As far as physicists can tell these physical characteristics occurred with a spectacularly lucky roll of the dice at the moment shortly before or after the Big Bang, and if any of them was off by even a percentage, life would be impossible. If hydrogen interacted with oxygen in even the slightest different way, ice would not be lighter than water and that would have made the earth too cold for life to ever exist, if gravity was just a little stronger or weaker, the universe would have rip itself apart or imploded on itself.
Of course the reason that we can appreciate how lucky we are, is because life was able to exist in the first place, but to get a sense of scale which is always difficult with large numbers, it was like winning the lottery every week for year. We do not know how many universes have existed before our own, it would be extraordinary if was the first one and the conditions for life just happened to be perfect, but it is also extraordinary that life managed to develop so quickly and with extraordinary tenacity, given that each stage up the levels of consciousness require such extraordinary leaps that we still do not fully understand.
When we think of life, we should be astounded, confounded and befuddled by the sheer improbability of the whole thing. Perhaps the ability to get use to any situation is a coping mechanism to be able to get on with the everyday task of survival in a hostile world, perhaps we are given that window of opportunity in our childhood as a gift to experience sheer curious awareness, to be able to see the world as it truly is, an extraordinary place of wonder where everything is astonishing and we are able to learn how the world around us works. Children certainly have extraordinary abilities to learn languages almost by osmosis, indeed in the circumstances where two parents speak two different native languages, the child ends up speaking both languages completely naturally.
Luckily for us, almost everyone has a memory of being curious about the world, there is always something that fascinated us, whether it was people, places or things. We all remember being lost in thought and wonder about something, it is always a very strong memory and I encourage you to seek out those memories from your past, as they are such strong anchors of the state of curious awareness for you to remember and change your current state back to, remembering is to experience it. It is easier to recreate an old feeling rather than creates a completely new experience, strangely very few people seem to remember learning to speak their own language which may be part of the reason why we learn languages differently when we are adults as we have no memory of the experience of doing it the first time. So we are fortunate to have bank of experiences and memories to recreate that magic of being completely lost in a sense of wonder.
And there is so much to be amazed at, how people treat each other and experience things as they are happening seem to almost defy logic, as we have all had the experience of regretting what we did and yet we still do things we regret. We are so much better at being good people in retrospect, if you are able to examine this with curious awareness instead of self labelling yourself as a bad person for being just the same as everyone else, it seems like a better place to live your life. Curious awareness sets aside judgement, it helps you to experience things as they happen, as it replaces your internal dialogue of thoughts that almost always have nothing to do with the actual moment you are in. It turns your awareness away from your internal life, and put your awareness into the external world. In meditation term, it moves the watcher up to the front of the bus, instead of watching your thoughts it watches the world around you, it is possibly the closest we can get to the experience of our ancestors before they had language. It is almost impossible for modern person to imagine in their minds, what thoughts looked like before there was language, possibly there was only feelings and emotions, whether that made them more powerful or less we may never know, however it seems probable that it was easier for your awareness to be fully engaged in the external world in the way that modern meditators wish to recreate through their practice, where our ancient ancestors did out of necessity because a lack of awareness would result in their deaths. When walking through the grass was a life or death situation as any accidental scratch could result in infection that killed you, your awareness was probably totally on the moment in a way that is difficult for modern humans to imagine, and we have the gift of curious awareness becomes of them.
