Turning Subject Into Object: An Exercise in Perspectives

“It’s a troublesome place, difficult to administer, and as a piece of real estate it’s worthless because by definition there’d be no one to sell it to.” – Dr Who

In Yogacara, the Mind is seen as the space in which we construct our reality. The Mind takes information from the 5 senses and decodes the information based on our past experiences, our cultural conditioning, our beliefs and our value systems, creating a personal constructed version of reality.

As we interact with the Universe, we sit in the middle of the subjective awareness.

Each time we encounter new information that we do not have a past schema for, we experience dissonance, an unfamiliar feeling of uncertainty of mind. We can either ignore the new information, thus eradicating the dissonance, or we can allow ourselves to be changed by engaging with the new information, and include the new information into our new subjective awareness.

We have grown – we are now able to take a greater view of reality. If we were to see the diagram above as a map, we might see that the rings represent the contour lines of a mountain with each new ring increasing the height of the mountain.

So that in Integral Theory we say that as awareness expands, so does our altitude. We have a horizontal expansion and a vertical expansion.

Another way of looking at this would be to take Robert Kegan’s approach of subject to object.

The circle below represents our subjective experience, or, as Kegan would say, our order of consciousness…

…if, however, as we expand and grow we add another ring…

…what was once subject I can now look at. I am able to step outside the experience and see that past experience from an objective point of view…

I have taken subject and turned it into an object.  Let me offer you a thought experiment to demonstrate…

A Simple Thought Experiment

Imagine that you are in a cinema, and, on the screen, you are invited to project an event from your past – something in which you had to make a decision, and that you have enough distance from so that you are able to observe the experience.

Now ask yourself with hindsight, “Could I have made a different decision?”.

You have now taken an objective view of something in your past that was once a subjective experience.

If we were to take both these incidents to their logical conclusion there would become a point in which we would no longer be able to take an objective view because we would have reached a point in which we were sitting within the field of ultimate subjective experience.

Therefore, what stops us from achieving ultimate subjectivity? Well, for one thing, it can be very difficult to accept that all that we experience are just experiences…

Try this;

The Mind and its Assessments

Place your right hand on your left forearm, feel the texture of you forearm, just for 2 minutes see if you can let everything go and just experience your left forearm.

Difficult isn’t it – in order to make sense of the experience we have to use the mind, but the exercise above asked you to just have an experience; it did not ask you to in anyway judge the experience.

The mind is always taking an objective view – that is its job. But the mind can also be conditioned by our ego and our shadow. Rather than making an objective assessment based on available data, the mind tends to make objective assessments based on subjective past egoic experiences;

It’s Monday morning, you have had a great weekend and now it is time to get up and go off to work. Your mind is setting up how you will experience the workday, you are going to have to work with that person who is so loud, there is the boss who is so demanding, and the work is so dull. You wish you could get a new job but you know that eventually the new job will just become like this job.

“The more we work to increase our altitude (our development), the more we begin to recognise how the ego conditions the mind.”

Slowly, you close around the experience that today is going to be just like every other day. You have fixed your egoic field of awareness; you have closed your mind. You have stopped evolving.

However, the more we work to increase our altitude (our development), the more we begin to recognise how the ego conditions the mind.

Open Mind

As Susanne Cook-Greuter’s work has shown, the greater our level of development, the more we are able to transcend the ego, and as we transcend the thraldom of the ego, the more the mind is free to just experience.

Moreover, as we gain a greater freedom from our ego, we are able to take more perspectives; we are not locked in a personal perspective by our shadow repressions.

We can move away from our everyday, egoic field of awareness, into a much richer and deeper way of being. We now see the world through an Open Mind. A mind that is free from attachments to past experiences, a mind that is able to remain within the now moment. A mind that is open to the endless possibility of expression.

The Apartness and Partness of Existence

In addition, as we begin to make this transition into Open Mind, we begin to realise the apartness and partness of existence; as we love ourselves we realise that all that is manifesting moment to moment is love, a love that reaches down from above and a love that reaches up from below.

As we practice Open Mind we expand into fullness, we open to the wonder and joy of the universe. Nevertheless, this is only one part of enlightenment; we might call it the Mind evolution of enlightenment.

The other part of enlightenment is Freedom, and that comes through practicing awakening to Spirit – the last of the core modules of Integral Life Practice.

Gary Hawke