If you are not Self-Aware you can be anything aware WITHOUT even knowing it.
Have you ever wondered how it could be that someone becomes so intertwined with something they accept or believe in that it becomes who they are?
Ever meet a Vegan? A member of PETA? A believer of a lie?
The way self-awareness emerges in the brain is a process that is fraught with potential wrongs. If self-awareness is not nurtured and brought forth in a young human child, that child will become connected to something other than self. Parenting matters.
Whatever goes into the brain the most will control what comes out of it. Unless the brakes of self-awareness are active.
What IS Self-Awareness?
It is the collection of memories made up of you and your place in them. It is a second level brain function operating on short-term memory. If you do not have a collective memory of your place in your memories you are not self-aware. That is a short term memory that feeds long term memory and contains memory of the memory’s place in context. But self-awareness is far more than just a collection of memories. It is a remembrance of your place in your memories. That position puts you in your life, separate from the things you do, are, say, see, hear, feel and otherwise comprehend. You are you, you are not what you do, or what you think, or how you look.
But if you have not developed a self-awareness in memory, then you cannot find your place in what you do, how you think, or how you look. The more that separation is evident to you the more other-aware of it you become. Something made to be paramount but is not you; becomes you. You eat food and focus on that food while eating and it makes you sick to know it was alive and playing in the fields and you killed it to eat it you must be bad. You become a PETA follower and turn your love for animals into a fixation for fulfilling what you cannot fulfill when you are not you. You are unique and separate and not at all what you see, or hear or feel about it all. Your causes are fleeting as nothing satisfies.
As you go through life your brain is processing input and doing something with that data continuously. If garbage in, garbage out was the way it worked, if that was all there was to it, you would be as smart as any of the thousands of artificial intelligence toys pretending to know what intelligence is. In other words, you would be dumb. Not stupid. Dumb. You would act intelligent because a human doing anything other than foraging for food under rocks appears intelligent until the person opens her/his mouth or speaks out in typing.
How can you tell if a person is not self-aware? Listen to them talk. If they finish sentences in an up tone, or if they always seem to be asking questions that are not questions. That person is not fully self-aware. People observe that condition and consider the person an introvert. An extrovert can also be non-aware. Politicians prey on those people. All you have to do is tell them something enough times, in an ever increasing manner that is interesting and entertaining and you wind up with a sheep.
A fully self-aware person cannot become a sheep. Despots don’t like those people.
Short term memory represents ‘now’ in your brain. It is a maximum of seven seconds in duration. As long as that short term loop is connected and it keeps feeding a record of itself into long term memory that person will be self-aware, because long term contains what short term contains and it is the same person. But if that short term memory is not collecting a whole from the parts of memory then that person is not self-aware and is ready for the cull.
The answer to every single human mentally caused ailment or condition is self-awareness. We are built to have it but it takes nurturing and training and knowledge to cause it to take over a person, apply the brakes and bring that person to the forefront of humans who have actually acted like the evolutionary gift given matters. Self-awareness was a right of passage in this country. It was loaded with mistakes and experiments and testing the limits of logic to find out that the youth who emerged became an adult. Not today. The older young people are not adults today. Many are, but most are not. It is those who are not self-aware that every single political promise is made to. Self-aware people don’t believe political promises. Non-aware humans will fall for anything.
The very fact that you are able to comprehend the concepts of memory makes you human. But if you are not self-aware, what you think you already know will prohibit you from knowing anything else.
What you deal with in life will be met with the limited arsenal you have at your disposal. The single most important one, being your knowledge of where you are, who you are, what you are and when you are.. IE: your collected memory of yourself in life determines whether you have access to the brakes. A self-aware person can apply brakes to anything. A person who is not self-aware, or is less than fully self-aware cannot stop the anger, the rage, the crying, the focus on whatever the overlords want to be focused on.
Now that you are old enough to read you are way past the natural emergence of self-awareness (happens around 8 years of age normally.) So now, you have to learn how you brain works in order to take control of it and stop being something you are not.
Be yourself. It is always there waiting to be found.
Once you have turned on self-awareness you will be pleased with the result. So will the species.