Awareness? Pah!
Irony of all ironies, after having written so extensively on the inherent power of technology and how I actually cannot live without it, today I broke my phone. Argh. Not intentionally, of course. I stayed over at a friend's place and had a bottle of make-up remover, that I hadn't shut properly, in the same bag as my phone. Stupid, stupid, stupid. The liquid got into my LCD screen and the buttons, and now I have a huge watermark on my screen and the buttons do not work.
Almost immediately I discovered the effects. I needed to call another friend this afternoon, but couldn't remember her number because I always just use speed-dial in my phone book. My parents couldn't contact me to arrange when to pick me up. Today is Zhen's Birthday and I didn't remember until just now because I only had the reminder on my phone. And I can't SMS him/call him to wish him happy birthday, because my phone doesn't work, and I don't remember his number. I fell asleep when I got home (didn't exactly sleep much last night) and overslept because I had no alarm clock (which my phone doubles [well, triples] as). I don't know what's going on in the world, because I can't receive my news SMS's. I can't call any of my friends because I do not know any phone numbers. My friends cannot call me, and so I am cut off from the rest of my social world. And while waiting for my mum to pick me up from Vista Kiara, I was bored because I couldn't play snake on my phone. Tell me this is not the most masochistic form of slavery you can think of.
Bah. Technology.
And it will cost RM80 or something to get it fixed.
Anyway. Due to the aforementioned lack of things to do while waiting for parents to pick me up, I was forced to become more aware of my surroundings, and something a bit disturbing(?) occurred to me - we call ourselves aware of our surroundings, but in reality all we see is what our consciousness selects for us. If the world around us is a beach, in reality, all we do is take a handful of sand, look at it and call that our world. Everything else is filtered out - we build a dam against the deluge of minutae and detail that bombards our senses, and call the little trickle that seeps through into our consciousness "our surroundings". Not just by sight, but even most sounds require a conscious effort on our part to hear them.
And I suppose that's a good thing, in a way, since if we saw every single detail all the time, everywhere, our brains would probably overflow within days, or something. It's a bit like my email inbox. I get a deluge of junk mail in my hotmail inbox, all of which I disregard almost automatically, but amongst the sea of irrelevant junk, little nuggets of gold, e.g. in the form of a 6k email from a friend (hi Dave), can be found and filtered out. If I read through every piece of junk mail I had, I would either go crazy and kill myself, or be killed by my parents for the astronomical phone bill.
Anyway, all I'm saying is I find it quite funny that we call ourselves conscious individuals, when our true gift seems to lie in unconsciousness.