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   %EXPERIENCE REALITY APPROACH ATTITUDES OBJECTIVE 900428

     The  way  we experience reality depends upon  how  we
approach  reality.    It depends upon which of  our  sense
organs  we pay most attention to,  and which we choose  to
ignore most of the time.

     Blind  people  experience reality  quite  differently
than  people with healthy eyesight.   If we chose to spend
our  lives with our eyes closed we would in a similar  way
experience   reality  quite  differently  than  we  do  as
normally seeing persons.

     While  few  people with healthy eyes live  with  them
closed,  many people do live with attitudes,   assumptions
and  beliefs  which  filter  out a major  portion  of  the
information which they might gather through sight,  sound,
touch,   taste and smell.   We may be unaware by virtue of
ignoring  certain  mediums of communication  most  of  the
time,   or  by virtue of being highly selective  regarding
what  messages we concentrate our attention upon.   We may
be  out of touch with reality because we  literally  avoid
touching.

     When we do attend to some sensory input the nature of
our experiences  depends   greatly   upon  the  attitudes,
expectations,   fears,   hopes,   aspirations,   concepts,
assumptions,   convictions,   and languages with which  we
attend to some sensory input.

     If we are compulsively objective in our attention  we
expect to encounter impersonal objects and do so;  fearing
to  encounter  personal and reflexive realities  which  we
cannot understand,  predict and control in objective ways.
We  thus  encounter  and understand  an objective universe
which is devoid  of any essentially mysterious,  spiritual
and/or personal realities;  because our relationships  are
dominated    by   compulsively   objective  attitudes  and
expectations.

     The  objective reality which we experience is in part
an echo of our expectations as we enter into relationships
with others.  Objective reality is in part our conception,
conceived by the way in which we approach others;  by what
kinds  of relationships we are willing to participate  in.
If   we  are  unwilling  to  enter  into  reflexive  (non-
objective)   relationships  we  live  and  die  within  an
entirely non-personal reality which is external to us.  We
learn  to  understand,  predict and control;  but we  find
little meaning and personal satisfaction therein.

     Objective reality is realized in our consciousness of
our  relationships  with  realities  from  which  we  have
distanced ourselves in order to view them objectively.  In
significant  ways  objective reality is our conception  of
our  relationships  with others.   Compulsively  objective
people   have  a  tendency  to  neglect  to   develop   an
integrative conception within which they themselves play a
coherent  role.    This is because by the rules they  have
developed to govern their relationships,  they must always
be separated from that which they observe,  so they cannot
be  self-observant  in integrative ways;  they  cannot  be
reflexively reflective,  for that is forbidden by  taboos,
collusions and their addiction to pure objective research.

                                                                                                                               
                         (c) 2005 by Paul A. Smith in      
                    (On Being Yourself, Whole and Healthy)  
                                                                                                                               
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