What is contracted awareness?.

Response:

Contracted awareness is the opposite of expanded, open awareness.  

Contracted awareness is tight and constrained. It is what our separate, limited self does when it is afraid or feels threatened. 

As awareness contracts, it is more isolated, its perspective narrows, so its vision of reality is more distorted. 

Fewer available options are seen, and offered help may even be rejected out of suspicion. 

With prolonged contracted awareness, a sense of desperate defensiveness takes over and we get stuck in survival mode.

Our true self is a state of open, expansive awareness that fears nothing and rejects nothing. It knows itself as the unlimited unity of all experience. 

As our true self emerges, contracted awareness naturally dissolves.

Love,

Deepak