TOPIC
Not what you know you don’t know, but what you don’t know you don’t know.
In our magical thinking, our individual meaning making, we can create identities and ideas of our selves that ignore aspects of ourselves deemed as unacceptable. This can emerge through culture, family, self worth, any range of contexts combined with how we each respond to them.
These blindspots not only hide bad behaviour but also prevent us from gaining the wisdom and golden aspects of our character of which are part of the same territory.
How do we uncover our blindspots?
How do we listen to hearing feedback for behaviour we do not believe we play out?
How do we determine what is our blindspot and what is another’s projection?
What is the perfect playground to uncover blindspots?
Come and investigate our human experience through the topic of ‘blindspots’.
REFLECTION
We had two discussions this week, in person and on zoom. I have decided to have in person discussions every first week of every month. So if you are in the town of Bryon Bay drop in and share your perspective.
This topic induced a curiosity, where our conscious awareness found rest at the fringes of the unknown. We began to understand that our blindspots are actually more like an infinite void of ‘what we don’t know we don’t know’.
What informs us of our blindspots?
Relationship in its many forms seems to provide a reflection from which we can gather awareness of our unconscious behaviour and expression. Our kids, dogs, horses, partners, to the people you pass on the street and the expressions we commit by ourselves with music, art, writing and even how we work. Interaction with the world is one of the most reliable sources in expanding our conscious awareness of ourselves.
However there is the maze of the mind’s meaning making that can muddy the waters. For example how do we determine what is our blindspot and what is another’s?
We can remove all stimulus with meditation and art practices, where we have no opportunity to displace our responsibility. Or we can take everything on with the idea that every interaction has a 50/50 split of responsibility. The latter has endless opportunities for potential escapes of responsibility with all kinds of addictions that have found their place as protection mechanisms to maintain our blindspots.
Why do we want to maintain our blindspots?
As we touched on with ‘self sabotage’, there is a tendency to maintain the dream of perfection. This could be the perfect identity, the perfect relationship, the perfect life, etc.
As we are confronted with challenges that defy our ideas of perfection we can have a varying sympathetic reaction; faun, freeze, fight and flight. We please, hide, fight, run and look for convenient state changing substances and activities to distract us from the ambiguity of reality. All of these reactions create a disassociation from ourselves and the environment around us.
This dream of perfection, as Esther Perel suggests, is grown from our childhood context. In which our young minds are in awe and wonder of everything around us. We are supported and looked after in a way in which we will never again experience.
This sacred dream is so pervasive it has incentivised an aesthetic world in which we go to great lengths to communicate our perfected image.
On all scales of our western society we ignore the ginormous gapping hole in our awareness, the blindspot. That can only be described as total ignorance of this ambiguous mysterious reality. This ignorance is desperately held by our own charming delusions of perfection and our escaping habits of addiction.
So where do we begin?
The art of dying to ourselves to birth the fool who knows nothing and has a childlike awareness that shapes our temporal existence.
Just as David Whyte suggest in his beautiful poem, ‘just beyond yourself’.
‘Just beyond yourself there is a place that beckons,
Half a step to self forgetting, the rest restored by what you’ll meet.
Just beyond yourself.’
We finished our discussion with a journey into metaphor; surrendering our safe beaches to flow into the ocean, jumping through inter-dimensional doorways to discover a world in which we know nothing to being vigilant around our static blindness that labels aspects of this reality such as a ‘rock’. A rock is more than a rock. And we humans and this reality are infinitely more than the meaning we ascribe.
Thank you all x
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