Attempting to answer the question “Who, or what am I?” can feel like an immensely complex undertaking, which I would argue is primarily because of our typical yet remarkably limited way of perceiving “reality”, a fact which is almost impossible for us to recognize in ourselves. This article aims to clarify one source of this confusion.
I think it is reasonable to accept that “who” we are today, how we experience and understand ourselves, others, and the world around us, has developed and been shaped mainly through the dynamic interactions between the world we encountered growing up, and the innate qualities and capacities of our being that perceived and made sense of that world.
Given this, then everything we do, every thought and perception we have, every belief we hold, and every action we take now, is inextricably linked to our history; to something that has already happened. This fundamental and inescapable feature, that our experiences of our present life and our subsequent responses to it flow from our past, offers us both advantages and disadvantages.
The primary advantage is that we don’t have to continually relearn how to navigate our world. The success of our ongoing survival is critically dependent on our ability to learn from our past experiences and apply those lessons to our present lives. Without such acquired learning, the world would continually appear as a chaotic buzz of meaningless confusion, leaving us helplessly unsure of what was going on or how to respond. Without intensive and ongoing external support and care, we would struggle to survive and would perish within days or, at best, weeks.
However, this capacity to utilize and apply what we have learned from past experiences also has one major disadvantage. Let me explain.
Anyone, who for whatever reason, decides they need to change their way of being in the world, to feel less distress or distracted, to become a better person, to eliminate bad habits, or improve their relationships, is going to have to figure out some way of doing things they haven’t already figured out
If we intend to become healthier and create a better life for ourselves, we must act and think differently than we have up to this point. But what exactly are we going to count on to make new and different choices to move in healthier directions? If we are using the same mindset, the same learned behaviours that led us into difficulty in the first place, how can that mind now be counted on to provide novel solutions it couldn’t provide before?
Consider this for a moment: if our previous way of being in the world didn’t work for us, what sense does it make to think we can rely on it now? Just a bit more effort? Just think more deeply? Despite our motivation to live differently or reduce our suffering, the inescapable truth is that we are going to have to find a method that offers someting other than our existing ways of viewing ourselves and our world. If our current understanding were sufficient we wouldn’t still be trying to figure it out .
So I contend that if we truly want our life to look different, perhaps to become more psychologically mature, to learn healthier ways of living, we will need to develop a fundamentally new means, a new methodology of understanding ourselves, our relationships, and the world around us. Otherwise, we are destined to repeat
This is going to require us freeing ourselves from the familiar, that which we already know, and simultaneously, we must learn and develop new ways of understanding and preapare orselves to travel down paths which will be unfamiliar. Put another way, we must learn to discover that which we as of yet do not know about. But exactly how do we do this, and what does this even mean?
The article titled “What Is Mindfulness (Part I)” begins to unpack this idea of freeing ourselves from the known and introduces a new way of learning and methodology of understanding. I will serve as an initial exploration into an approach I have developed and utilized in my practice and my life over the last 50 years.