Chapter 1
All journeys begin with us
I’m serialising my book “The Observing I: A guide to living a more authentic life” on Substack, with a new chapter being released every Wednesday. I’m a big believer that philosophy should be available to the masses, not locked behind paywalls or hidden away in dusty archives. So I’m making my book available here.
This is Chapter 1.
As human beings, we are natural storytellers. It’s in our blood. From the imaginings of a fictional world to the tales we tell our friends in the restaurant or bar. Stories flow through us and from us and into us.
Before the introduction of the written word, we told stories to each other as a means of passing on knowledge through the generations. Carrying our cultural history in the memories of children and grandchildren, who would then carry it on to those who followed.
We only have to go back to the myths and legends of old to get a feel for what a culture or society was like. Take the Viking eddas, or Homer’s “Odyssey”, or the Bhagavad Gita, or the tale of Anansi the spider. Each one gives us a distinct feel and understanding for the people and the society of their time.
It shouldn’t surprise us then, with such a rich history of storytelling in our make-up, that we also happen to be really good at telling stories to ourselves. Those stories shape how we see “us”. They tell us about our own internal culture. Some of our stories are going to be empowering, and some will be limiting or even destructive.
They all form part of the constant narrative that’s unfolding in our minds. Many of us won’t stop to question or challenge the stories that play out on a daily basis, and that’s fine if they’re not harmful. The issue comes when these stories do us a disservice, or they were written by something or someone outside of ourselves.
Here are a few examples of unhelpful stories that you might have come across yourself:
I’m not good enough.
I’m too fat/thin/short/tall/ugly (insert physical trait here).
I won’t succeed.
I can’t…
I’m really unlucky. No opportunities ever come my way.
Does any of that sound familiar? Are there stories that you tell yourself that, on reflection, are holding you back? If I asked you to take a moment to stop and consider where those stories came from, could you?
Not all of our narratives come from us. Our personal story is a gestalt of our experiences, expectations, and perceptions of the world and the people around us. What we’ve been through. What people have told us. How we’ve interpreted events through our own conscious lens. All of this plays a part in our ever changing perspective.
The legendary Japanese swordsman and philosopher Miyamoto Musashi spoke extensively about the importance of adapting to changing circumstances and maintaining a strong, adaptable mindset. He wrote that the mind has two eyes. There is the Observing eye, and the Perceiving eye.
Observation and perception are two separate things; the observing eye is stronger, the perceiving eye is weaker.
Musashi calls the perceiving eye weak because it’s an overlay of our prejudices and prior experiences on top of what we’re witnessing in the now. Through this lens, we’re not seeing the world as it is - we’re seeing the world as we believe it to be.
That overlay applies to our judgement of people and their motivations. It applies to the circumstances we find ourselves in, and it impacts our interpretation of the facts and the subsequent choices that we make from those interpretations. It informs our personal story.
The Observing eye, however, witnesses the world for what it is. It sees reality without emotion or judgement. There are no distractions. No extrapolations or fearful imaginings of what might happen. Instead, we’re seeing things objectively and without bias.
It’s also about awareness. Being present and mindful in the moment of both ourselves and the context of our experience.
Our natural state is to view the world through our Perceiving eye. In this, we have to recognise that our individual reality is deeply personal and unique. What we see as our world is a combination of two things: the information that comes in through our senses, and a projection of our own perceptions back out again.
We could put two people in exactly the same situation at exactly the same time, and their personal realities of that experience will be different. If we had a couple of people on a little sailing boat, for example, one person may be afraid of the water and the other may love it. The first person’s story is going to be “if I fall in, I’m going to drown, I’m really not liking this” and the other’s will be “what a great day for a sail”.
I hate driving, and I don’t drive. I’ve had a lot of lessons. Somewhere in the region of 100 hours. At no point during any of those hours did I ever step out of the car thinking that it was fun. My perception is that there’s way too much to pay attention to, my brain doesn’t function well at 60 miles per hour, and what if someone does something that I can’t predict and I crash and die?
At the end of every lesson, even my last one, I climbed out of that car a sweaty, trembling mess. I tried a manual, then moved on to an automatic so that there was one less thing to think about. That did not help. Eventually, I decided it was in the interest of everyone’s safety that I just don’t do it and move on to something else.
Yet there are millions of people who drive and experience none of this. The act of driving itself is no different, it’s just that their stories around driving are very different to mine. Their reality of driving is not the same.
Conversely, I used to love downhill mountain biking at the same time that I was learning to drive. That’s not exactly safe, and yet I was totally fine with that. In fact, I loved the rush of it. I don’t do it any more thanks to a shattered elbow as a result of said downhill mountain biking, but even that doesn’t change my perception of the level of danger. I’d happily get out and do it now if it weren’t for the warning I received at the time that I must not break that elbow again.
There is clearly some limiting belief that I have associated with driving. When I reflect on it, I’m drawn to an experience that I had when I first started to learn. My first instructor (one of many) trained college students like myself all the way up to Police interceptor drivers, so on paper I like to think that he knew what he was doing.
Unfortunately, my instructor was in the midst of a divorce whilst he was trying to teach me how to drive. There was one particular lesson where his soon-to-be-ex wife called him up, and he took the call whilst I was driving down some windy country lanes near to where I grew up.
As you can imagine, his tone changed quite dramatically after that call. He became angry, hot tempered, and explosively criticised everything that I was doing. This, in turn, made me nearly veer into a hedge and then skim a car that was passing on the other side of the road. I say skim, I mean that any closer and the cars would have been exchanging paintwork.
It wasn’t until years later when I was talking to a friend who was deeply confused as to why, in my thirties, I was unable to drive, that this memory came to light. In hindsight, it was deeply unprofessional of him to a) argue with a wife that he was divorcing in the middle of a lesson, and b) direct his resulting anger towards a 17-year-old kid.
The thing is, that single experience stuck, and it changed my perception of driving. We mustn’t make the mistake of thinking that it’s long-term, prolonged negative experiences that shape our perception. All it takes is one single moment of experience to drastically alter our outlook.
I changed instructors not long after that, but the scathing critique and the way in which it was delivered hovered in my mind whenever I got behind the wheel. My narrative had become all of that shit that had flowed out of his mouth.
Don’t get me wrong – I don’t resent him for it. I’ve thankfully never gone through a divorce, but it looks horrendous. I also have no interest in cars, never enjoyed driving lessons even before that incident, and I’ve probably saved a good few lives by refraining from it.
Yet the way that I think about driving is all through my Perceiving eye. It’s my experiences tainting my view of it. I might actually, with a bit of practice, be good at driving. My belief even now, however, is still that I’m not.
Much like my view of driving, when we experience life, we’re constantly applying the overlay of that Perceiving eye on to what’s happening to us. It becomes a sort of feedback loop – our experiences shape our perceptions and our perceptions, in turn, shape our experiences.
Going back to the example of our two sailors, the person who was afraid of water had a bad experience because of their fears, so their perception becomes “boats aren’t fun”. Then because their perception is that it isn’t fun, their experience in the now becomes one of fear and anxiety. Their perception moulds their experience, which in turn moulds their perception.
Ultimately, the biggest obstacle standing in the way between us and our perceptions is ourselves. Those stories that we tell ourselves and use to judge our experiences.
What I hope to do here is to help you to think about the stories that you’re telling yourself, so that you can decide whether they’re working in your interest, or working against you. I’m going to invite you to hold up a mirror to yourself, and explore what you see with your Observing eye.
The book is available to buy from Amazon as a paperback or an e-book, if you want to add it to your book shelf.