May 27, 2019,
Life, Love, Relationship 
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In The Games People Play, Eric Berne defined the process of becoming autonomous (self-determining) as the manifestation of the “release or recovery of three capacities: awareness, spontaneity, and intimacy.”
Let’s take a closer look at the first of Berne’s three capacities for Autonomous living.
Awareness
For Berne, Awareness is the capacity to observe the world through all five of our physical senses, plus intuition, which might otherwise be defined as coming to understand something unconsciously through the combination of all our senses.
However, it needs to be done in one’s own, unique way, and not in the way someone else once taught us.
Berne offers this example: A child hears a bird’s song, but he doesn’t know it comes from a bird. Its tune and pattern please him. The well-meaning parent feels that the child would enjoy the song even more if he knew the name of the bird. However, naming the bird might actually rob the child of wonder— the wonder of not knowing how the magical sound was made or where it came from. According to Berne, true autonomy lies in recovering the ability to sense the world with imagination—one that is not pinned down with knowledge and facts.
The moment a little boy is concerned with which is a jay and which is a sparrow, he can no longer see the birds or hear them sing.
— Eric Berne
Some people experience synesthesia, where they experience one stimulus with a different sense from what we usually use. For example, they may feel a vibration in response to the smell of perfume or see a shape or color in response to a thought or an idea, hear a sound when they look at something (maybe even a whole orchestra of sound), and so on.
Some believe that children experience life synesthetically until adults train them out of it through education.
I won’t get on a soapbox; I’ll just say that we might have something to learn, or relearn, from our children. If we could all recover this skill, we would experience the world autonomously—our own way, not the way we are expected to experience it or taught to us by someone else.
At its most basic, awareness means being able to live totally in the here and now, avoiding preoccupation with somewhere we aren’t, or with the past or future. It is experiencing the event of the moment fully: smelling a rose, watching a sunset, hearing an amazing piece of music, or enjoying wild, passionate sex without any distractions.
The aware person is alive because he knows how he feels, where he is, and when it is. He knows that after he dies the trees will still be there, but he will not be there to look at them again, so he wants to see them now with as much poignancy as possible. (Berne 1964)
Let me know your thoughts on this topic or how you experience your world synesthetically.
To the wonder of you,
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