A big reason why we wish to tap into greater perspective is to gain clarity on the situations in our lives that we feel are holding us back from enjoying life. Tapping into greater perspective gives us choices, choices on how we wish to experience the world and how we wish to feel as we move throughout our day. It determines what we can mold our future into.
We move through life with particular viewing lenses based on the way in which we developed seeing the world. Dependant on our unique paths, what type of childhood we’ve experienced, what we’ve lived through, our particular blend of DNA and what conditioning, both culturally and socio-economically we’ve been molded from.
When we step outside of our regular patterns and habits we naturally begin to see the world differently. The experience of something automatically becomes different from moment to moment no matter how many times we relive it. It changes even more when we add new stimulus to our experience. This is why it’s so good to get out there, speak to a wide variety of people from different walks of life, take a class or travel to see the world from a totally different cultural and socio-economic perspective.
If we stay in a similar environment and revisit the same people day in and day out, our box of lenses is limited to those perspectives. Each time we step out and experience something new we’re adding a new lens to our box of perspectives and thus a new way of seeing the world that can help us over come our limitations.
I’ve been very fortune to have had a wide array of life experiences both in work, lifestyle, people and travel. I’ve collected many lenses over my 39 years of living on this blue dot. There is no limit to the amount of lenses we can acquire, they go on for infinity and that number is infinitely expanding, always. They allow us to swim in a sea of perspectives when interpreting the world.
I highly recommend to anyone stuck in a loop, depressed or feeling stagnant to try something new. You’ll be amazed at how much a new experience, doing something you would normally not do, will change your view of the world, yourself and thus increase your adaptability.
Carina Riseman my amazing Therapeutic Yoga teacher once said, our health is determined by our ability to adapt. I think this is really true. How well we can adapt to change will determine how rapidly we can overcome any obstacles life throws at us.
Each reaction we have to the world is based on our particular lenses. Our unique way of analyzing and experiencing our lives and others is dependant on the lenses we have accumulated. It is impossible to look at ourselves from a completely objective perspective, but we can through our subjective lenses, attempt to gain greater clarity of the truth behind our subjectivity.
I can’t pin point the quote but it’s so relevant, “we can never be the seen, we can only be the seer”.
Where we find ourselves stuck on our paths is when we are unable to move beyond a particular perspective. We all find ourselves reacting to situations, living out our triggers and personal biases based on our beliefs and the sometimes unruly feelings produced by them. How we grow is by challenging our own perspectives again and again, I read a great article here that inspired me to write my own version of the many layers of illusion we often find ourselves in.
One of my main tools for expansion is questioning myself and others, especially those in authority or those that create a great reaction within me. It’s extremely healthy to question everything, sometimes the answers to those questions provides us with a new way of seeing the world that literally becomes the perspective that shifts our experience completely out of victimhood, to that of empowerment, or from devastation to that of illumination.
We all have the need to work through our dharma and personal reactions to any given situation, the ones that trigger us off. It’s natural to jump when a wound is touched. We all have wounds and scars that have created some of our lenses. Creating room for a universal perspective to balance our wound’s reactivity out is tremendously helpful.
We can sit in our pain and equally hold a vantage point of universality that all perspectives are true simultaneously. This ability, this open mindedness, relieves suffering and condemnation, opens up the way for forgiveness and a greater truth to emerge.
This kaleidoscope of perspectives in large makes up the mystery of life, the fact that there are so many lenses to chose from and experience life through is what allows us to evolve.
It’s our absolute right to sit in any one single perspective for as long as we wish, but opening ourselves up to different view points of experience allows us to jump timelines, heal spontaneously, solve difficult problems and create new things to offer each other.
There is something in psychology that is called cognitive dissonance, this is the feeling that we get when we’re integrating various lenses or perspectives within ourselves. I am in the habit of holding space for many different perspectives at once, due to my life path, so it doesn’t feel so uncomfortable to be in two, three or four mental perspectives at once, but for those not used to looking at life from different angles it can be challenging at first to reach outside your field of victimhood or stubborn points of view to open space for growth.
Most people believe that the way they see the world is the only true way it is, period, but we all know that’s bs. We need to allow ourselves to step into uncomfortable states in order to grow and expand into new places, developing our capacity to master adaptability. Integrating fragmented aspects of self into one whole universal self, I believe is the end goal, Enlightenment.
One of my biggest pet peeves is when I’m listening to someone tell me ‘their side’ of a story, a story of how they’ve been hurt by someone and they expect me to pick sides with them. It seems like life would be a lot more peaceful if we could hold strong to the fact that there are many sides…always. When we’re experiencing a particular side, it is because it’s essential to experience that side in order to heal our wounds and grow.
This doesn’t mean that the other person was right, people are so afraid of imaging that the other could be right due to ego constraints anyway but what it does mean, is that it is necessary to stay open to the wide array of possible reasons a person could be responding the way they are.
A person’s decisions and reactions have everything to do with them and nothing to do with us. Even if someone is acting in a hateful or amoral way, our response to them belongs solo to us and is our responsibility alone.
“It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters”. Epictetus. It’s about how well we can turn coal into liquid gold, hate into love and sadness into joy, not only for ourselves but for greater harmony.
This is when life becomes fun again. Knowing that how we are reacting or viewing the world is simply a temporary perspective, one that will inevitably change with time as new experiences layer themselves on top of each other. Wow what freedom!
Changing lenses allows us to not take ourselves too seriously. It allows us more room to play and dream. It also allows us to not be as reactive and narrow minded towards others and life’s situations. Lessening how much we can be hurt by others and how much we choose to judge others. If we don’t like the lenses through which we are viewing the world we can just switch them or choose to hang out with different people, it’s that simple.
The thing we have to watch out for when tapping into universal perspective is not to use this perspective as a type of spiritual bypassing, a way of over-looking our responsibility in dealing with our wounds and trauma.
When we’ve been triggered, the first step is to turn the microscope on self and do the inner work to see where we ourselves have created the situation which we’ve been triggered by. From there we can transform the lens that was created by the wounded parts of ourselves, the one that caused the trigger and suffering. Once we are no longer triggered we are way more effective at dealing with an actual outside problem in the world and taking concrete steps to change it.
If the trigger keeps on returning through other situations and people in our lives, you are guaranteed that you have not dealt with the root cause yet.
Once this huge feat has been completed, a birds eye view of clarity will appear, not for us to judge others as to where they are in their process but to know clearly that what they are offering as a vibration is not something we resonate with. Then and only then can we use proper discernment to decide whether it is healthy to continue sharing time with that person.
We all have every right to discontinue spending time with people that are offering a vibration or perspective we determine is not in alignment with our unique path of development. People feel so guilty about this, especially in regards to family members but that is usually because they feel like they have to find reasons to justify their decision, which in turn produces judgment.
The natural way of the ego is to push down which it feels is limiting its evolution by discerning through mental markers that which it is above. We need not do this, we are all on our unique paths and are perfectly aligned to what it is we need to experience in order to grow.
We are all learning and growing so much each day. In my eyes wounds and scars are a beautiful thing. They remind us of what we have lived through and provide us with a platform from which to grow from. Without them, we would not appreciate the blissful moments and perspectives life can offer.
One love,
J