In the end, we asked ourselves, at least in class we asked ourselves, what we wanted for our children. We questioned the idea of "the higher purpose" or "higher good." That abstract concept made sense to everyone who heard it but only as an abstraction. None of us had questioned the nature of that higher purpose or good. As we discovered, something that asserts a powerful influence on us but on which we have never questioned or critically reflected serves as a meaning perspective. We see through that perspective, and we learn through that perspective, and we make choices about our actions motivated by that meaning perspective. It exerts all that influence, yet we had little or no idea of where it came from nor even that it was there at all. In fact, according to our working definition of the self, meaning perspectives form unaware parts of our selves thus preventing our continued opening into the becoming self.
That seemed a very strange paradox. We established that we wished to become more and more of our self. As with children, we wished to live as a fully becoming self. Still, there inside of us existed a meaning perspective that we believed in and acted on, yet we felt no awareness of its actual existence. We knew it as an essential truth of life, on the one hand, and did not know it all on the other hand. That makes for quite an imbalance in our hands.[36] Awareness jumped out of that thought. Perhaps the key to what we wanted to know about self came in more awareness of our becoming self. It seemed suddenly obvious that we had been doing just that, but I and we weren't fully aware of our pursuit of awareness.
We thought again about the purpose of the class which had a distinctly instrumental tone in the institutional syllabus. When we got into the matter we discussed at this point, were we getting away from the point? Was all this talk helping students in the class engage in more positive attitudes toward and actions in interviews and in their professional and personal lives?
We discussed where I thought we had gotten in our class, and I asked them if they thought that self-awareness had become for us a valuable and productive if not absolutely necessary form of study in the pursuit of the course goal, an improvement of the instrumental skills of interviewing. They readily agreed that it would. Many said that they felt it has become obvious by this point, as if the question had become unnecessary. If that was the case, we once again asked how many people did they know who actually pursued self-awareness in any conscious way? That produced quite a few answers which responded to the question but didn't actually answer the question. People didn't have time for that. Life was too busy and demanding. People just didn't know how, and they didn't know they should. Besides, they spend too much time watching television. Once again, we returned to the idea that had come up earlier: "They're afraid of what they will find out. They're afraid they won't like what they find."