Many centers of meaning making, not just mind 🤓

Many of us have never stopped to consider how many ways we’re already “making sense” of the world. Not just mental—our physical, emotional, intuitive, relational, energetic, erotic, shamanic senses of what is, are constructing a reality by dividing up this and that just like our concepts.

Practically, knowing this helps me relax and let go. I’m more open to feedback. More adaptive to what’s really going on (eg: Creative potential misinterpreted as sexual / romantic attraction). My natural love and honesty are not hijacked by unquestioned stories. To unpack it a little:

My body makes sense; bodies stitch together raw sense data and create interpretations which we then take to be real. Your body gets the shape of the ground wrong when you’re drunk. I watched my niece evolve from not seeing shapes when she was born six weeks ago to recognizing faces. Common body constructs are often more predictions than facts, eg: “This chair is trustable.” (Is it?)

My emotions make sense of the world too. Sometimes as a result of thoughts and sensations (the temperature drops and I get scared), sometimes being the cause of them (I’m scared and now I get goosebumps). A lot of therapy hinges on recognizing our emotions and then “questioning” the reality-interpretations they create by being in touch with an experientially obvious current alternate interpretation of what’s happening. “I feel scared, while I’m also aware that I’m in a boring and safe room.”

All of these meaning centers interpret and create a world without requiring any coherent concept of ‘me’ (ego) while also creating concepts of me in their realm (who’s doing the sitting in the chair?). Sometimes these creations are independent of each other, sometimes they feed each other.

Construct-awareness means an ongoing recognition that ‘real’ is an abstraction, including “physical”, and “emotional” realness, including this very meta-map of experience. (I think the next evolution of consciousness experientially feels the process of constructing as an indivisible part of what realness is, both as and distinct from the constructor, constructing, and constructed).

If the only ‘sense’ I can identify is my mind, then all the other sense-making happening has me by the balls. And, I’m likely to judge others for being “too heady”. Unable to connect to them in the richness and beauty of the way they make sense of the world, I’m likely to demand they come to my preferences, rather than feel the grief of the gap between us, or learn to truly see through their eyes.

Let’s make other meaning-making centers object, instead of being subject to them.

OK — so this has already been “too philosophical” by my self assessment, but there’s no better time to share this Nerdy definition of a Flow Session 🤓 we sometimes unpack in Level Up: “A group process of communication that opens all meaning-making centers to facilitate consciousness self-awarely radiating as interactions, in such a way that the distinctions between I and we/other are both preserved and blurred.”

Flow - is the same process as above but between any I/other (not just a group process).

With love, Jordan