The Art of Perspective Taking
In the paradigmatic shifts that occur across the ages in history and the perspectival shifts that occur across a human lifetime, hopefully, we can learn something about perspective taking. Swinging from one stance to another, we can see through them into the underlying nature of reality.
What appears as dogma from one perspective may be simple common sense to another. What appears as rigid guidelines from one perspective can sometimes be a poor transmission of a deeper understanding. A dogmatic stance may also be an unnecessary gesture repeated through time, unmoored from any underlying reality.
Recognizing the sacredness of life concretizes certain values that could be seen as dogmatic, but maybe simply an observation of what is, an observation based on lived experience. The more we understand the sacredness of life the less we take it for granted. The dogmatic stances that can emerge from this may become too rigid to express the underlying reality. But the reality itself just is.
At its best, tradition is based on lived experience transmitted across generations. It can become misrepresented across time. But reframing the guidelines we live by according to lived experience is a part of the ongoing process of cultural emergence.
Perspective taking is an art form. It is a continual practice. All perspectives are in some way partial but not irrelevant. It’s not just a swirling chaos of competing views of reality. Value itself exceeds the human mind and it is a part of the wider terrain that we inhabit.
Jonathan Stewart Mill observed that people “tend to be correct in what they affirm and wrong in what they deny”. A perspective represents a particular stance in a place and time. Often, it has elements that are both wrong and right, but there is an underlying value being expressed through it. When we can see the true value, we may see how that perspective is gesturing towards a deeper principle. We can see the light of understanding shining through it.
Zak Stein coined the term "valueception" - the ability to perceive value as a fundamental principle. As he describes it, all of us have access to perceive value, but learning to perceive it more accurately is a skill that can be developed. Value is not relative and it is not a human construct. We may all have a different perspective on how to translate it into embodied practice, but the value itself is pervasive, it is ambient, it is embedded, and it is a foundational pattern upon which the universe is constructed. Sometimes we confuse a singular viewpoint with true value. But true value itself is more fundamental than any particular human construct.
Mathematical structures, musical harmonics, and art and ethics all describe the fundamental structures of reality. Our ability to perceive something of beauty or recognize an ethical principle is a perception, not an invention. We perceive it through our encounters with the world, where it already exists before we experience it. It exists before thought and is a part of every phenomenon, including being human.
We cannot know the mind of the universe in its entirety. We can only see a little bit at a time. But every partial thing is itself a name of god. It is its own whole. It is itself through and through.
Sometimes we see from a myopic lens and only look at the tragedies of our lives as the whole reality. Tragedy is a partial view of who we are and what life is offering. But we can’t go from the tragedy straight into its resolution without first attending to what is arising. When the partial is fully expressed, both its true value and its partiality become more obvious. As we see and integrate it, the partial view is no longer essential but it may still arise intermittently. As it arises, we have an ongoing invitation to accept its presence without being captivated by it. Whatever is seen fully transforms itself in the immediate moment.
Until we turn towards the tragedy and acknowledge it, it will drive us, it will feed into unconscious beliefs and structures and it can become the nature of our known reality. It can become parasitic and draw our attention back into itself repeatedly.
Sometimes we look at the world from the tragic perspective but eventually, we can find space to turn inward to look at the tragic perspective itself and see that it is not the whole truth. This gesture is powerful. To look at instead of looking through a particular point of view is a kind of magic. Recognize the truth that it holds and also its limitations. Allow it to continue to arise, but watch it from a different referent and look into and through it. Then it becomes more diaphanous, as Gebser describes, and we can see the essence of life shining through it.**
This is one of the practical applications of integral theory. Awareness of awareness is psychotherapeutic. It helps us to release our addiction to emotional states and stories. It helps us to soften our fixed opinions and fixed notions of identity - not because they are wrong - but because they are best understood as catalysts for an ongoing process of integration which overarches any singular experience.
Life is amoral but it is infused through and through with value. It is neither tragic nor heroic, it is not good or bad, it simply is. The essential nature of life is something to encounter by looking into and through all that we experience.
*Credits:
This piece reflects on the works of Zak Stein, Jean Gebser, Jeremy Johnson, and Integral philosophy in general. It also reflects on my own dreamwork and experience of life from an integral perspective.
The concept of seeing into and through the world, and the concept of structures of consciousness is from Jeremy Johnson's book 'Seeing Through the World'
Johnathan Stuart Mill Quote is from the book 'On Liberty'.
Zak Stein and Iain McGilchrist’s discussion of Valueception is here - https://channelmcgilchrist.com/valueception-what-does-it-mean-to-see-value-with-zak-stein/'
The idea of fundamental value or first principles is not unique to Zak Stein or any other modern philosopher. It has echoes in Jean Gebser and Thomas Berry and Greek philosophy, and much older world traditions. It is reminiscent, for example, of the 7 grandfather teachings in Ojibwe/Anishinaabe tradition. The word ‘valueception’ is a modern vision of a preexisting concept, and it is a demonstration of what it is describing.
Image title: Inner World
Made from: American Robin's nest (Turdus migratorius), American Beauty Berry (Callicarpa americana), Crocosmia berries (Crocosmia spp), Spurge (Euphorbia spp.), Stonecrop (Sedum spp.), digital kaleidoscope
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