Navigating with Proficiency Your Inner Life
Reason and judgment have an important role to play in human life. Nevertheless, we can take too far the use of even our most valuable tools.
When we focus on one thing enough to form an opinion about it, we often narrow the scope of our inner vision to such a degree that we can no longer see the entire picture of our circumstances.
For clarity to persist, we often must allow our perspective to relax and allow-in a multitude of variables — sensations, thoughts, impressions, and patterns — without judgment or evaluation. When we are at peace with all of these things, allowing them to enter and leave our awareness without latching on to them, we get a sense of simply being. That is, we gain an impression of the way things are without the additional layer of our own judgments.
As one expands meta-conscious awareness, ideally he learns to use the mind’s eye to focus in on individual things that require judgment, or to relax and “pop out” of focus to see, with greater clarity, the way things are.
When one finds himself experiencing unpleasant or undesirable emotions related to a specific judgment or evaluation, he has the choice to “pop out,” and see the emotion for what it is: a sensation, just like the perception of the choice and its related variables.
This stoic perspective is an escape hatch for our worst impulses, and can be a path towards conscientious cultivation of those emotions and traits we most want to be part of our character.
This is a kind-of meta-choice that opens up as we expand awareness and learn to navigate with proficiency our inner life.
© 2021 Noel Bagwell. All Right Reserved.
