On Awareness and Awarenesses
Roslyn Young
I want to write about awareness and awarenesses because French and English
allow me very different entries into this area and consequently very different
awarenesses about the nature of awareness and of awarenesses.
For some time now, I have been with the difference between awareness as a
state, and "awarenesses"; between "la conscience" et "les prises de conscience".
We can easily understand this difference with the help of the following table.
At the point on the left of the diagram, question and answer are simultaneous.
Here, we are in the area of states of awareness and English requires us to
use the word "awareness". We could even say that simultaneity of the question
and the answer is what characterizes this state of awareness. The question
is the answer. When I try to describe this state in myself, I describe the
movements of my presence.
In fact, as soon as I stop going about my usual occupations for a few moments
and look inside myself, I cannot fail to realize that I have an inner life
made of thoughts, of the reception of impacts coming from outside, of recognition
or not of their meaning(s), of emotions, sentiments -of all the activities,
the inner transactions, the qualities which allow me to live a life.
My access to my inner and outer life takes place by means of my presence which
is constantly moving, going here and there to grasp what is accessible to
it in my environment. When I observe my way of functioning, I see that my
presence goes to any activity whatever which come into my mind for the slightest
second, anything of which I become aware. My presence moves to take into account
impressions which touch it or affect it. Each time my presence moves, it generates
one or more facts of awareness, facts of which I am aware. (Science tells
us that many impressions come into each of us without having gone through
the field of our awareness and that, for this reason, there are, in each of
us a huge quantity of 'unconscious facts'.) What we are dealing with here
are facts of awareness, facts of which we have become aware.
I can be present in my awareness and aware of my presence, which tells me
that the two are not the same. In both English and French, what we call "presence"
is characterized by a certain focalisation which is not necessarily the case
for awareness.
All the facts I know to be in myself are facts of awareness. I stop typing this text for a moment and move my awareness to the world around me and immediately I hear the cars in the street, some noises from round about. I begin typing again and, instead of focusing my attention on the content of my mind, I take it to the content of my ears. Immediately I hear the noise the keys make as they touch the bottom of the keyboard. I move my awareness inside and immediately find the taste of a banana I ate half an hour ago, the feeling of my feet on the floor, my sweater which is making me itch at a precise spot where it is touching my skin. Each of these tastes, these sensations, these noises, constitutes a fact of awareness, since I am aware of them.
In this description of my inner state, it would be artificial to try to distinguish
questions from answers. I can, if I decide to do so, find a question each
time: What is my ear hearing at this instant? and now? and now? and I am immediately
aware of the answer. In fact the places to which my presence goes constitute
both the question and the answer, simultaneously.
But as soon as we start moving to the right of the diagram above, where the
question and the answer do not take place together in time, we move into an
area in which French allows us a deeper understanding than English. This is
the area of "prises de conscience". Why "prise"? This word, from the French
verb "prendre", meaning "to take", is also used for jelly "taking" when it
goes from its liquid to its solid form. "Prise de conscience" can well be
translated as "gellings of awareness". As we move away from the point, Gattegno
invites us to speak in English of "awarenesses" or of "becoming aware". The
French term "prise de conscience" draws our attention to the energy transactions
involved, the gellings necessary to create these awarenesses. We are closer
to the tension created by the question which grows in us until the answer
springs forth. The corresponding release of tension is accompanied by an "Ah!"
so characteristic of an awareness -here, we move into the area of countables,
since each awareness can be counted- and the loudness of the "Ah!" is in relation
with the strength of the tension associated with the question.
Thus, at the far right hand end of the scale, we have, as an example, the
gelling of awareness Archimedes experienced which led to his running through
the streets shouting "Eureka!" so loudly that the echo comes down to us 2400
years later.
Archimedes had a question. How was it possible to measure exactly the volume
of gold in the crown without melting it down? This question had been with
him for some time, creating a tension which, we can imagine, became greater
as the days went by. I like to imagine a tired, dispirited Archimedes stepping
into his bath and gently sinking down into the delicious hot water. Suddenly
the different relevant facts of awareness come together and "gel" into an
awareness -if he places the crown in a container completely filled with water
and if he measures the volume of water which overflows, he will effectively
have measured the volume of the crown. None of the facts required to produce
this awareness is new. What is new is the coming together of the relevant
facts in order to create a new awareness which, in French, is described as
"une prise de conscience", a "gelling of awareness".
To illustrate what is being said here, we can take what English speakers and
French speakers say about Silent Way and what they mean by what they say.
In English, people often say of Silent Way that it is an approach based on
awareness, which, obviously, is true. In French, when making what appears
to be the same statement, people say Silent Way is an approach based on "prises
de conscience", on awarenesses or "gellings" of awareness. This gives French
people a very different vision of the approach from that of English speakers.
The French put the accent on the creation of questions and the tensions which
will be there until the answer springs into one's consciousness. For the French
speaker, the teacher's job is to create good questions which will lead to
awarenesses.
The English speaker, on the other hand, may well think more in terms of awareness
as a state. His language encourages him to consider his role as being to create
conditions in which the student will be present to the job at hand. Since
his language does not spontaneously allow him to think about awareness as
a countable (Gattegno's use of the word "awarenesses" in the plural is not
a standard way of using English), he may easily neglect to think in terms
of creating as many gellings of awareness as he can. He might never realize
that one of the ways of judging a lesson is to count the awarenesses which
were visible or possible.
For the French speaker, the point in the diagram where the question and the
answer are one is referred to as "la conscience", a word meaning both "a state
of awareness" and "conscience". Since our French colleagues often prefer to
keep out of the area of moral considerations and since they detest ambiguity,
they have a tendency to speak in terms of "prises de conscience" which is
quite unambiguous and which is "awarenesses" or "gellings of awareness". The
French language encourages them to consider that their job is to force awarenesses
rather than to create a general state of awareness. Thus the French can more
easily neglect this basic state of awareness in which the conditions of presence
and attention are produced, conditions which lead to the accumulating of facts
of awareness, those very facts which are necessary for "gellings of awareness"
to take place.
© Roslyn Young
Besançon, France
June, 1991
The Science of Education in Questions - No 5 - June 1991