Dr. Orion Taraban warns that partial self-awareness can be dangerous, like an unfinished journey best avoided unless you commit fully. He contrasts perpetual seekers who never find answers with finders who settle into grounded expertise, arguing that self-awareness only helps when it moves from curiosity to purposeful introspection.
Chapters
Scott says, deep question for you, is there such a thing as too much self-awareness? Where does introspection become emotional masturbation? Well put, Scott. Good question.
Yeah, there's, there's kind of an in-between space with respect to self-awareness, like a lot of things in life, that's very dangerous and uncomfortable to abide in. There's this old joke about enlightenment, and the joke is, enlightenment better not start, having started, better finish. It's like, if you're not gonna go all the way, it's probably best that you just fucking take a different route in life. But if you decide to take that road, like walk it all the way to its completion. So it's really like a little bit of self-awareness, a little bit of enlightenment, a little bit of knowledge, a little bit of anything is a dangerous thing. Sometimes it's better to just not open up that can of worms. And there's certainly a, let's say, a valley through which self-awareness can lead to being self-conscious, which can lead to one feeling really awkward and alienated from self. The self is also a labyrinth. It's very easy to get lost in the search for self because there might not be a final thing to find. If anything, the self is the process that looks for itself. I don't think that there's something else that that process is going to find that is the self, because who's initiating the process if not the self? So the self is, it's looking for what it is, which is one way of playing hide and seek. Some people like to play hide and seek. It's like there are, some people are perpetual seekers and they'll say to themselves and to others, I'm just looking for truth. I'm looking for real goodness. I'm looking for enlightenment, et cetera. I'm seeking it. There's something romantic about that adventure of never finding. But if you're seeking, you're not finding. You're seeking. You're seeking. If you're a seeker, you don't want to find. Finding means you stop seeking. And a lot of seekers need to be honest with themselves that they don't want to find. They want to keep seeking, which allows them to keep wandering and to keep hoping that over that hill is the promised land. And maybe, maybe there is no promised land. Or maybe it's right where you're standing. So sometimes people have to make the decision to find. And when people start to become finders, there's generally enough around them and certainly in the content of their consciousness to find what they are looking for. If we're talking about enlightenment and—
It's getting choppy on us here.
Back? If we're talking about enlightenment and self-awareness, you can do that anywhere and under any conditions. So it's like where you are right now is the perfect place to find yourself. You don't need to go somewhere else or study under a guru. It's like the Buddha sat down on one tree. Like there was nothing special about that tree, that banyan tree. It just happened to be a banyan tree, in my opinion. So like you can start to find anywhere. Now, if you keep going, I think that self-awareness becomes a positive. But there could be a valley that you have to pass through for that to occur. Just like you might need, you know, sometimes a little bit of knowledge ruins everything because the more you learn, the more you start to learn how little you actually know. And that fucks up all of your frameworks about your mental models and your sense of self and your identification, et cetera, et cetera. But if you keep going, you might actually get to not omniscience, that's impossible, but to some measure of grounded expertise. Which is a good thing to have, in my opinion. There's nothing wrong with that as long as you operate within the limits of your expertise with humility.
Grounded expertise in yourself. What is the discipline that you are an expert at at that point? Just—
yeah, you can be an expert in yourself too. Like, you can, can have expertise in self-awareness. You can have expertise into your own instrument, into your own consciousness, and that's extremely useful as a human being. So I would say if you've already started down this path and you're a little self-aware, keep going, keep, keep going. Because if you stay there, it's going to suck. But if you keep going, maybe you'll— and you start to shift towards like, also, what's the purpose of this? I think I'm guilty of this when I was younger. People can fall into just navel-gazing and introspection for the sake of introspection. And I don't find that to be particularly useful. Even the Buddha had a point. Like he was trying to escape suffering and his introspection was in service of that goal. He didn't just say, "Well, I got nothing else to do today, so I guess I'll just examine my thinking." So stay goal-directed and keep going.
So we may have somebody that's trying to reach some kind of— somebody tries to keep some or tries to go on this journey of self-awareness. It's to what end is the question. Like, what are you trying to solve? What are you trying to do here? I think for a lot of people, the answer would be I'm bored and looking for some kind of deeper meaning in my otherwise boring life. Or for some people, you know, I, I just went through some kind of trauma and I'm looking for ways to cope with said trauma. For a lot of guys watching this, probably, my spouse left me, cheated, and all this other stuff, and I'm trying.
Yeah, I think most people are looking for answers. It's often we reach the conclusion that there are no definitive answers. There's just tentative explanations that we're willing to accept because they're useful.
