What is awareness? Unamuno, Life. 7.9
For
Unamuno, the most basic human awareness conceivable is a perception
of death, and of pain. Love is what we feel as we notice other beings
seeing their death, feeling their pain, and liken them unto us, who
also see our death, and feel its pain.
Si
miras al universo lo más cerca y lo más dentro que puedes mirarlo,
que es en ti mismo; si sientes y no ya sólo contemplas las cosas
todas en tu conciencia, donde todas ellas han dejado su dolorosa
huella, llegarás al hondón del tedio, no ya de la vida, sino de
algo más: al tedio de la existencia, al pozo del vanidad de
vanidades. Y así es como llegarás a compadecerlo todo, al amor
universal.
Para
amarlo todo, para compadecerlo todo, humano y extrahumano, viviente y
no viviente, es menester que lo sientas todo dentro de ti mismo, que
lo personalices todo. Porque el amor personaliza todo cuanto ama,
todo cuanto compadece. Sólo compadecemos, es decir, amamos, lo que
nos es semejante y en cuanto nos lo es, y tanto más cuanto más se
nos asemeja, y así crece nuestra compasión, y con ella nuestro amor
a las cosas a medida que descubrimos las semejanzas que con nosotros
tienen. O más bien es el amor mismo, que de suyo tiende a crecer, el
que nos revela las semejanzas esas. Si llego a compadecer y amar a la
pobre estrella que desaparecerá del cielo un día, es porque el
amor, la compasión, me hace sentir en ella una conciencia, más o
menos oscura, que la hace sufrir por no ser más que estrella, y por
tener que dejarlo de ser un día. Pues toda conciencia lo es de
muerte y de dolor.
Conciencia,
conscientia, es conocimiento
participado, es con-sentimiento, y con-sentir es com-padecer.
The
nearest and most intimate place to find the universe is within your
own self. If you look for it there, if you go beyond contemplating
all the things in your consciousness to the point of sensing them,
allowing yourself to feel the painful impressions they have left upon
you, then you will arrive at the utmost bounds of boredom, not merely
with life, but with anything beyond it. This is boredom with
existence, a well of tedium from whose depths we draw the vanity of
vanities. Sunk beneath its waves, you shall at last come to
experience the suffering of all being that is love universal.
To
love everything—to suffer and feel for everything human and not,
alive and not—it is necessary that you should feel everything
inside yourself, that you should personalize everything. For love
personalizes all that it loves, every single thing that it feels for
and conforms to. We only feel for things, or in other words love
them, to the extent that they are like us. This feeling intensifies
as the thing becomes more like us, our sympathy rising alongside our
love as we discover likenesses it shares with us. Or perhaps it is
love himself, growing in his own right, that reveals to us these
likenesses. If I succeed in feeling for the poor star that shall
vanish from heaven one day, if I manage to love it, this is because
love, or compassion, makes me sense some consciousness or awareness
dwelling in the star, however vague or shadowy. I feel the star's
awareness, the burden it must suffer for being no more than a star,
and the pain of having to abandon this being one day. For all
consciousness is awareness of death and of pain.
Consciousness, Latin conscientia, is
knowledge shared: fellow feeling that when shared with another
becomes fellow suffering, compassion.