Subjectivity and Storyteller Consciousness

 
When we seek outside of ourselves we carry the hidden assumption that our own inner knowing is not to be trusted. Being deprived of the opportunity to develop our individual decision making authority, the space to test boundaries and make mistakes, we become paralyzed with indecision and crippled with disempowerment later in life. Do I go with life path A, or life path B? What direction do I go? What foods are healthy for my body? How should I live my life? Defer to the experts! Someone else, some external force, can direct my decision, then if I make a mistake, I will have an excuse, something to blame. They made me do it! I had to! What would happen if you rewrote your story with empowering language, where each action you take is your own choice? “I don’t have to, I choose to… because…” This is not to say asking for help or advice is not useful, it is just important to remember that in the end, you are making the decision.

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Personal Meaning

Personal, direct experience is essentially the only real truth to you; everything else is simply conjecture, mere rumour at best. Our society has been operating through the guidance of a severely unbalanced perspective, one that places all “credible” analysis on that which can be shown objectively, the cold hard facts, completely ignoring the more fundamentally subjective nature of our own unique experience. Sure, if we break apart this whole, you can show me results of A interacting with B, and maybe other people can too or maybe something else happens, but what does that mean to you? What could the story of the “parts” be leaving out of the story for the “whole”? How does the story influence your personal story, your direct experience? What do you think and feel about the story you are hearing? If we apply the information contained within a story as a metaphor for our lives, how would that change our perspective about the world?

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Widening the Lens

A society built from the collective deferral of personal authority to “experts” creates a narrow and limited path of potential directions for the collective. When we look to “more credible” sources for knowledge and guidance on how to live our individual lives and structure society we leave out the imaginations of so many perspectives. The experts are doing the best they know according to what they have learned and been taught. Yet results will always fall short of their potentially positive outcomes due to its nature as a limited perspective. Resilience is strengthened through diversity.

The mono-direction we are headed collectively is spiralling us ever-more out of control. The magnitude of the crises being further unearthed as we discover the far reaching, drastic, and unintended consequences of our current “control and manage” approach to implementing solutions. Perhaps widening a road to ease congestion in fact results in more development and more traffic. Maybe growing farm forests to increase red wood production ends up producing less through overall ecosystem degradation. What if using chemicals to control pests and increase crop yields resulted in weaker crops and stronger pests? What if taking antibiotics to eliminate illness in fact weakens our immune system, increasing the likelihood of a future disease? Is it possible that our increasing desire to control, and the solutions created through the lens of manipulation, in fact lead to a greater need to control and a higher degree of uncertainty?

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New Windows of Participation

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Once we realize that everything we tell is a story, an abstract representation of reality, and that we as individuals choose the stories we tell about our lives, we can begin to open new windows of possibility. I believe that, despite our increasingly painful attempts to structure society in a linear fashion, our universe is made up of non-linear systems at every level, from the cycles of cells in our bodies, to the planetary rhythms of the Earth. Waste is food. This is a world of feedback, a dance between self and other so interdependent that even a small investigation begins to dissolve the story and language surrounding the “self/other” divide. Is the bacteria is our intestines, without which we could not digest food, part of the human body? Examine any part of the matrix of systems all around us and the boundaries of “self”, the story of an isolated being, will quickly crumble and stories of relationship will emerge.

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One aspect of this ongoing feedback loop is the way in which we story our lives. The stories we tell influence our personal and collective experience of life. This is a truth that I have chosen to integrate into my experience and its effects have radically altered my life, and continue to do so as I more deeply integrate its expansive meaning. This is not a truth that I can “prove” to you. It is a truth, like all truth, that only you can prove (or not) to yourself through direct experience. And it is just as valid as that professor’s, that Business Man’s, that politician’s, that person with the alphabet soup behind their name. Quantum mechanics might not directly prove that we influence our reality at this macroscopic level, yet it can provide us with a new metaphor with which to interpret and story our lives.

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Living Your Story

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It is time to become conscious actors in the storying of our individual and collective lives. This requires participation. This requires speaking our truth with compassion and living it with integrity. We choose who we are by the truths we choose to live and the only way to know is to try! We are the authors of our story, not someone else who we are told knows better. Hold your stories loosely, share them with respect, listen to the feedback with humility, and together we create the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.

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One Love,

Skye