What we throw at the world becomes us 🤽

I find this obvious and yet mysterious: How we look determines what we see. Which in turn determines us. 

Looking at a table with your eyes versus an electron microscope reveals different truths. “If you look at Mars with a research telescope, you’ll see moons; if you look with binoculars, you won’t. But the moons are still there!” And still, you see one or the other. The superposition exists in abstract idea space, not in embodied cognition.

We have to make choices about the how—there’s no not choosing. Also, methods intervene—we make a choice (subject) to throw photons, or electrons (method of relating) at stuff (object) and we change the world, which then changes us. I crystallize a self around the methods I habitually engage. If this is true for physical objects (however small) how much more applicable is it for human beings?

Again obvious: If I “throw” curiosity and patience at my kids laughing in my face while doing the thing I ask them not to do, versus throwing anger and control at them, I’ll see different things and get a different world-and-me. Compassion versus control is not a moral choice here, but a selection of predictive priors with different emotional cost functions.

But why, when it’s so obvious, do I forget? How often do I get frustrated at my kids and exacerbate the thing I want to change? How often do I throw criticism at my weaknesses (rather than compassion)? Nervous system overload, ignorance, conditioning and history feel unsatisfying as explanations because the relationship between perceiver, perception, perceived is upstream of these.

One possible answer: The forgetting occurs because method-switching requires temporary ego dissolution, and the benefits the old method afforded.

Anger-identity provides certainty, narrative centrality (my actions are most important), authority (i’m in charge).

Relating differently requires abandoning entire reality frameworks; I’m not just grieving behavioral patterns but whole selves-and-worlds. Switching to curiosity means losing those benefits before I know if I’m OK losing them, or if I like the new benefits.

One way we try to get at this in Relateful Coaching (next cohort starts September 15) is through versions of the question: How am I getting exactly what I want? Or inverted, what’s bad about the thing I think I want? Or another way: What do I lose if I let go of what I’m currently getting?

In this case, the self constructed through anger-based relating to my children cannot survive curiosity-based relating. Each method instantiates a different version of me and a different corresponding world. (This is also why I don’t often rely on parts frameworks; in assuming a method of relating to a self, the framework obscures the choice-of-framework and therefore the deeper mechanism that each perceptual method embeds implicit ontological commitments, and therefore obscures the more causal power of choosing a different perceiver-perceiving-perceived framework altogether, affording greater freedom/flexibility).

One level up, the creative trinity I’m pointing toward applies to itself. It cannot be grasped by a separate self examining the process from outside. The framework of disliking my anger creates a solution-seeker identity who requires a problem it seeks to solve. Dissolving any framework dissolves both problem and solution-seeker. I’m left with whatever happens, happening, and being experienced without blame or assuming anything can be different. But then again, if I can choose something different, itself as a happening that doesn’t introduce a false split, I get to experience my preferences without the suffering subject-object splits induce.

This preference-as-happening rather than preference-as-agenda is a big offering of relatefulness. We can be with the anger, without creating another meta-identity of needing it to be gone. But we can also be with the not-wanting-to-be-with-the-anger. Surrender includes (you). Loving what is includes your wanting what isn’t.

With love, Jordan