What Is Self-Awareness? Dr. Vipin Gupta Discusses Obstacles to Living a Purposeful Life and the Solution

Professor Vipin Gupta, author of a 12-book series published under Project VIPIN, is Professor of Management and Co-Director of the Center for Global Management at the Jack H. Brown College of Business and Public Administration, California State University, San Bernardino. Dr. Gupta has a Ph.D. in managerial science and applied economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. 

In What is Self Awareness, Dr. Gupta discusses the importance of self-awareness and the three stages by which we lose awareness of the self, resulting in discord in our lives. The solution, he says, can be found by combining modern science with wisdom.

In his years as an educator and speaker on leadership, Dr. Gupta has met hundreds of people of all ages and has frequently noticed one thing in particular: many are not enjoying life as much as they deserve to or living every moment with purpose. “It bothers me to see this because it feels like humanity is groping in the dark for solutions to their dissatisfaction in life,” he says, reflecting. “We seem to be searching for what will fix our aimlessness. We read books, watch talk shows and TED talks, and look everywhere for the answer. Some of us turn to a transcendental power and depend on it. At the end of the day, though, no matter what we try, we still feel that same aching loss. I believe the answer is found in the gifts Mother Nature has endowed each of us with as her beloved child. In What Is Self-Awareness, I talk about how we lose that important sense of who we are as individuals and how we can regain it and live life joyfully.”

Dr. Gupta Explains the Meaning and Importance of Self-Awareness.

Dr. Gupta says that it’s helpful to understand that self-awareness is the awareness that we ourselves are the causal body for our destiny as an organization. “Unlike the widely-held belief, our destiny is not something in the future. Instead, it is the discordant energy we experience every moment of our lives. Crucially, self-awareness is not limited to ourselves as existing souls and biological beings but also creators.”

Ideally, Dr. Gupta continues, we are all able to develop self-awareness about our reality, causative reality, sequential reality, and consequential reality, and the entity reality. “The reality for each of us is one of a conscious entity that can make conscious decisions about life goals and fulfill them by becoming a person who knows the course of action to take. Of course, there is in many people a disconnect that leads to inertia in their lives.”

Dr. Gupta Talks about the First Stage of Losing Self-Awareness.

“This is called the law of attraction using the path of devotion,” Dr. Gupta continues. “See if this rings true for you: we are attracted to an ideal we wish to enjoy as our reality using our positive imagination. Basically, if you wish for something, then the entire creation works to bring that wish to fruition.”

Many people can relate to this idea. However, the potential danger in it involves the intentions or motivations of the wisher. “Say, for example, that you look around at your life and wish that you could have more money,” Dr. Gupta invites. “You look over at someone who is highly successful – I’ll throw out Bill Gates – and wish that you could have his financial advantages. Not uncommon, I think, right? The problem is that if all you do is wish and devote yourself to the idea, you will become the devil and have no energy to actually fulfill the wish. All you really want to do is to enjoy the imagined illusion.” 

Dr. Gupta Discusses the Second Stage of Losing Self-Awareness.

The next stage, Dr. Gupta goes on to say, involves the law of limitation using the path of knowing. “To understand this, let’s talk about what I mean by ‘knowing,’” Dr. Gupta suggests. “When one follows any path, one is guided by an intuitive knowing that one will eventually realize the goal of gaining knowledge of how everyone may realize the goal. After that, the goal becomes one’s reality. Anybody wishing to realize that goal becomes indebted to the one who now becomes the goal of one’s devotion. Through devotion to one who has already realized the goal, one wishes to know the path that will lead to that goal. Everyone’s positive imagination is guided by that one who transcends everyone.”

Returning to Bill Gates, Dr. Gupta elaborates, “In the 1910s, every child grew up wishing to be the next Henry Ford.  When everyone wishes to be Henry Ford, it takes a hundred years for one to be Bill Gates. The one who leads a path curves the reality for those who follow the path. Everyone becomes a shadow of the leader. Leadership becomes a point that makes everyone a clone of the idealized leader. That idealized leader’s consciousness replaces one’s self and its awareness as our self becomes the causal body of everything we do.”

According to Dr. Gupta, in the field of spirituality, that idealized leader is known as God.  In the field of divinity, that idealized leader is known as omnipotent because he becomes the known reality everyone wishes to enjoy and follow. In the field of humanity, that idealized leader is known as authority, who becomes everyone’s “I” and positions himself as a quantum photon for shifting everyone’s focus to him as the reality that matters.

“All of this leads to this unfortunate outcome: we conceive our reality to be deficient, and that is why we wish to change the person we are by enjoying and consuming like our ideal person. Therefore, our actions become diffused in diverse directions, limiting the profiting we realize through our performing,” Dr. Gupta concludes.

Dr. Gupta Continues with the Third Stage of Losing Self-Awareness.

The last stage concerns the law of repulsion using the path of action. “This is the inevitable result of the first two stages,” Dr. Gupta believes. “Our actions are oriented toward repelling our wishes to others so that they become devoted to fulfilling our wishes and make us the leader. Instead of fulfilling our wishes, however, most of us live our life fulfilling the wishes of others. After that, we expect the others to fulfill our own wishes. When the others do fulfill our wishes, we decide to just enjoy this as a conscious entity, one that is conscious that everyone has become our devotee. Eventually, everyone decides to wish that others would fulfill their wishes, leading to inertia and entropy.”

Dr. Gupta Reveals the Solutions to the Loss of Self-Awareness.

“First, remember that there is no such thing as coincidence,” he advises. “For anything that happens, there is a cause. Whenever we make a choice or a decision, that results in a reality in our present. It will also transform the universe of someone else who lived before you and it may very well affect the universe of someone who comes ahead of you. That person might also transform what you created.”

Lastly, it is crucial that even as we help others, we keep our own egos in check. “Look at what can potentially happen when we selflessly assist those around us,” Dr. Gupta suggests. “If someone creates a job, we can all agree that is a good thing. We must, however, resist the temptation to elevate the job creator’s standing above the job doer. If we don’t, then what happens is we reduce the value of that person who does the job. Where is the good in that? Instead, let’s all focus on our own personal development. Then, let’s give other people the gift of knowing how we did that, and that will lead to people who are both more content and more productive, resulting in a society with fewer problems and more advancements.”

How to get hold of the first seven books in Project VIPIN:

The first seven books – What is Divine Energy, What is Present Reality, Is Present Reality, Is Divine Energy, What is Consciousness, What is Para-Consciousness, and What is Self-awareness – are now available in full and Nutshell editions on Amazon and elsewhere as paperback, hardcover, digital, and audible forms.