We have the option to see everything in your life as collaborative; we are scared to say this because we don't want to victim-blame but we're also scared of the possibilities and transcendence that opens up.
OK I’ve tried talking about this before and it always feels impossible, but it also feels super important, so here goes, relatively uncensored (meaning super philosophical, my apologies and hope some of you enjoy!):
“We have the option to see everything in your life as collaborative”
The nature of the universe is co-constructed / nondual: I think “experience” and “reality” are fundamentally intertwined; you can’t talk about a world out-there without a subjectivity talking about it (experiencing) and you can’t have an experiencing without a world out there (reality). In other words, subject and object (consciousness and matter) are one interpenetrated thingy. When I say “reality” I really mean “reality-experience” and when I say “experience” I really mean “experience-reality.” Sometimes I just say “Life.”
I mean this in a very extreme way.
Not collapsing to the outer (materialism): This is not “there’s a pre-existing world out there, and many different pre-existing subjective views on it” which is the common way of understanding pluralism. That framing still fundamentally separates the outer world from the inner, and presumes a kind of self-existence of the outer without consciousness, which I think is basically epistemologically untenable. We simply can’t know if that’s possible, ever, because every thought- or real- experiment we do will always be known, by us, inside of a conscious experience.
Not collapsing to the inner (idealism): This is also not “there’s no world out there, just constructs,” which I see as incoherently self-defeating: where do the constructs exist? We’re just hiding the fact that we presume constructs are objectively existing prior to that statement, and then declaring nothing inherently exists. It also doesn’t jive with out lived experience that there seem to be “things” like the laws of physics that are outside of our ability to simply construct a new meaning around. Perhaps the laws of physics are mutable, but we’d still be left with a meta-physics claim, like the one I’m making:
The inner and outer, the consciousness and matter, fundamentally coexist as one occurrence. This is what I’m referring to as “life” in the title of this post.
From this claim I think another follows that there’s a (possibly) inviolable metaphysics of correspondence between the interpretation and world-out-there, a “mirror” to the (obvious to almost all adults) correspondence between the world-out-there and interpretation: eg I can reinterpret the experience of stubbing my toe, but I can’t reinterpret the existence of the table leg I stubbed it on. The most obvious inverse correspondence is that I can use my reinterpretation to change the outer world: let’s say I consider stubbing my toe a lesson, and what I learn from that lesson is that I want to move the location of my table. Now I move my table.
You can probably see where I’m going with this.
If I don’t have access to the interpretation that toe-stubbing is a lesson-opportunity, maybe I’m less likely to move the table, or change my walking patterns, or whatever. (Yes there’s another failure mode in thinking the lessons are always only internal lessons, but that’s recapping the “collapsing to the inner” mentioned above, so already covered I think). Having the lesson-frame changes the way we encounter and react to adversity, even as small as toe-stubbing. Any given frame changes the way we encounter and react to all that we experience, because they’re interpenetratingly one thing.
“Everything in my life is collaborative” is one of the interpretation-choices we all have; and it is causative in the same way “stubbing my toe is a lesson” is causative. I think this is a pragmatic statement of fact; here’s the value-laden one:
Seeing everything that happens as collaborative is very good way to live, and results in greater well-being.
It puts us in flow with what’s happening rather than resistance; it has us take self-responsibility for “what now” and keeps us close to where our actual power is (meaning making, as Frank said yesterday); all of this leads to a better experience regardless of your values and regardless of your life circumstances.
“we are scared to say this because we don't want to victim-blame”
This feels very un-politically-correct to talk about because people immediately try to apply it to others. They misinterpret it to mean, “If someone has a shitty experience it’s their fault.”
This is a mistake!
(1) I’m not using it to talk about others.
(2) The capacity to do something now doesn’t imply the capacity to have done something in the past.
(3) I’m definitely not saying it’s fair.
The statement is about everything in your life, not everyone’s life. The mistake at a philosophical level is trying to make it an “out there” proposition, instead of remembering the entanglement of inner-and-outer.
This clarification is super important because to the extent what I’m saying is true, it’s a huge, underutilized technology in well-being improvement available to you in your life, but it remains unavailable to you if you think that using it means you have to blame other people for their circumstances. Don’t do that! Not necessary! For personal use only! (Even when I apply these ideas in coaching sessions, and we teach them in The Relateful Coaching School, it’s always first from a place of asking questions, finding attunement.)
“but we're also scared of the possibilities and transcendence that opens up”
The other most common block to trying on this perspective is that we’re terrified of being this powerful:
What if we don’t use it responsibly? (Then you’d have the chance to see that as collaborative, taking the results as feedback)
What if we can’t use it well? (There’s no standard—that’s an unnecessary imposition we make up in our heads; and I don’t know if there’s an end either, so we’re always growing in capacity, if we want to)
Does this mean it’s our fault if we don’t have a good experience? (no, remember that would be collapsing the outer to the inner)
And we’re terrified at facing the reality of how deeply interconnected we are.
This means the “I” that I think I am really is indistinguishable from the entire world, which calls into the question the nature of that I. This is a scary thing to face, in my experience. Luckily, as far as I can tell the nature of reality-experience is holonic—transcendence always comes with including. So yes, I am much much bigger than whatever concept I make of myself, but that bigness doesn’t erase the concept or the me, it simply contextualizes it in something much grander. Which ironically, gives us a lot more room for self-expression, play, and surrendering into embracing the whole human experience with all of it’s complexity, suffering, and joy.
#DeepTakes