Taking the Long View
E16

Taking the Long View

Summary

Looking at our life more as a whole, spotting longer-term patterns and tendencies, letting this perspective deliver deeper awareness. Developing clarity and awareness through intentional reflection.

The Union Path Podcast - Taking the Long View
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It can be really easy to get bogged down in the various data of life. Especially in our modern culture, we have so much information coming at us at all times, from every angle it seems. Not only from the technology that we interact with, sometimes constantly, but in our relationships too. And our relationships with other people and the relationships we have with organizations and situations that we involve ourselves in.

There's so much information that it can be really easy to just try to oversimplify, or even ignore information that doesn't fit a narrative,

that doesn't comport with our ideas of how things should be or what we're actually doing or what should be happening.

It can be really difficult to take in everything that happens to us and make sense of any of it, because again, a lot of it is just too much. It's too much information, but it's also really easy to get lost in individual data points, individual circumstances, and kind of miss a larger message, miss what the whole of our lives is really trying to tell us.

Reacting to everything that happens to us not only has a whipsaw effect to it, of having us bounce from state to state to state, but it's really confusing as well. When we're overly involved in everything that happens to us, we're not really seeing the whole, we're not really able to process the patterns and themes of what's going on,

and we're not able to do this because too much of our attention is taken up on what's currently happening. When we're overreacting to the individual elements of life, we're really under-responding to the overall path our life is taking.

We're too invested, we're too bonded to the micro. And we're missing the message of the macro. We're too invested in what's happening right now, and not invested enough in what's really been happening over the long term.

A lot of these ideas can get pretty difficult to actually apply. Not only is it pretty difficult to really look at our entire lives and make any sense of it, it can be really difficult to try and mute or temper our reactions to the events and circumstances that are happening to us.

But of course, to really make sense of our lives, to really have a sense of agency and ownership and clarity over the direction our lives are taking,

we really have to endeavor to understand them, understand ourselves on a deep level. We really have to look beyond the superficial and the long term minutiae of daily life and really look at the overall themes, the overall patterns. Really work to pay attention beyond our own reactions. To really take a half step back, and be able to understand what happens to us and what we're doing in a greater context. To really be able to look at not only our own behavior and the effects it has on the people around us, but also the effects that people around us have on us.

And oftentimes this means slowing down a little bit. Oftentimes this means taking our response time and intentionally making it longer. Intentionally building in pauses so that we can actually process what's going on, so that we can actually get out of the reactive part of ourselves,

and be able to sit with things for a minute, be able to dwell in what's happening and not immediately leap into what we're going to do about it.

This can happen a lot with the patterns we notice in our lives, that even when we are taking a longer view of our life, we start to notice these unhelpful patterns,

these things that we seem to be doing, these ways we seem to be acting against ourselves, against our own self-interest, against the things we say and believe we actually want. Then once we spot these patterns, it's a part of us that immediately wants to erase them and rub them out. This is often the same part of us that wants to have the knee-jerk reaction of just doing the opposite.

But if we react too quickly, we can really miss learning about why we were doing what we were doing in the first place. Now we've taken an overly reactive view, and we're making overly reactive corrections to the overreactions we've witnessed that we've already had.

We're continuing the same sort of behavior, just in a different way. But this can get really uncomfortable. There's something that seems to be inborn in the human animal, that's this latent and sometimes overt discomfort with uncertainty.

That when we don't know, we work really hard to know, and sometimes needing to know so quickly means we jump to conclusions that are false.

And because we're dwelling enough in the unknowing, dwelling enough in the confusion even, we're not really considering the beliefs we hold as well as the new ones we're forming.

But this can be a really tricky thing. This seems like it could lead to a whole bunch of inaction, naval gazing, but this is one of those things like a lot of spiritual ideas that once we start to develop it, it really builds on itself. There's kind of a spiritual fitness that kicks in, that as soon as we start to change these habits, it is really effortful and really inefficient.

But the longer we stick with it, not only the more natural it gets, but the quicker it gets too.

And so when we take a longer view of our lives, when we actually look at what are these things I'm doing really leading to? What is all of this behavior in service of? How are all these beliefs I'm holding, as well as expressing, leading me to where I actually want to go, to a fuller version of who I actually am?

Then when we start to get curious about these sorts of things, when we start to really inquire within ourselves of what's really going on, what's really happening in this life of ours,

Where have we really been and where are we really going? We can uncover a whole myriad of deeper, more complicated ideas. But the deeper we go, the deeper our understanding gets, the more useful and durable our clarity gets.

And that seems to be the process we repeat over and over again. That we start to pay attention, and then that paying attention leads to awareness, and then that awareness leads to insight, and that insight leads to belief, and that belief leads to change.

And that with all of our action, everything that happens to us as, well as everything we do starts with us.

That intent really does undergird everything. Really starts everything, really is the initiating force, the instigating energy that puts everything into motion.

And when we really probe, when we really look at what we do and why we do it, over a long period of time, this intent starts to show itself.

And intent is, I think, more of a complicated concept, or at least more of a nuanced concept, then I think initially a lot of us would give it credit for.

Because we've all had the experience of having a very clear intent. We intend to do something and we do it. On a small scale, we can see the causality between intent and attainment right in front of us. We wake up in the morning and it snowed. We look at the snow, we intend to shovel the driveway. We put on our coat and our boots and go out and some amount of time later the driveway is shoveled.

We intended to do something and we did. And even though this is a very simple concept, these mechanics can play out and do play out with everything.

I think it's one of the most interesting things that we discover on a spiritual path, is just how involved we really are in our lives. How much creative credit we actually have. Of when we look around and realize that what happens to us is a reflection of what's going on inside of us. That's a really heavy thing to at first witness and then know.

Intent runs through everything. Intent starts everything. That's what gets it rolling. But again, it's not as simple of an idea when we look at all the aspects of our lives,

because intent is really tied up in ideas like belief, self-confidence, awareness, consciousness. That the thing that we are aiming to do, and more importantly, why we're doing it and what we hope to achieve, can really be filtered through all sorts of different factors.

We may be doing things, we may be choosing to do things, that are actually actively harming us, and so are we intending to harm ourselves?

Well, the simple answer is no, not usually, but the more complicated answer is yeah, kinda. If we really look at not only what we're doing, but why we're doing it, we can really get to the baseline of intent. We can realize that even though something may be harming us, we're actually getting something out of it.

And because we're getting something out of it, there's part of us that wants it. And because there's part of us that wants it, there's part of us that is not only maintaining it, but set it in motion in the first place.

When we really look underneath the things we do and even the things that happen to us, there's intent in there somewhere. But again, it's a, tricky thing to really identify. It's hard to take such an honest look at ourselves and really question our own motives, question our own beliefs,

really hold ourselves up to the scrutiny of as full and complete awareness that we can possibly create, that's hard. Because it's human nature to ignore the parts of us we don't really like, to look away from the less esteemable, less noble, less pure parts of ourselves.

But the thing is, no good is accomplished by ignoring parts of ourselves. Because those parts are still acting, whether we know it or not. Our lives are still a reflection of our whole selves, whether we know it or not.

And the deeper our lack of consciousness goes about ourselves, the more it feels like we're a victim. The more it feels like we're put upon by this world that is random at best, and cruel at worst.

This is where true, deep self-awareness is so helpful. The more we understand ourselves, the more truth we know and we can integrate ourselves, the more we understand our lives. The more we understand other people. The more we understand everything around us.

It's kind of a funny side effect that. We understand other people better by understanding ourselves more. That it's not, at least a first blush, what at least some of us, I think, would be frightened of. Of using too much self-awareness and then getting overly self-centered, and then when we're overly self-centered, we ignore anything that isn't about our own personal gain in that given moment.

That the more self-centered we are, the more ignorant we become, because we focus our awareness and our attention on a very small sliver of life, the very small sliver of personal gain in that given moment.

We shrink life down to whatever is currently gratifying me or frustrating me. But obviously that's a very, very small sliver of what's really going on. That it's boiling life down to an extremely fractional part of what it actually is. And when we limit life to such a, small window, is no wonder that the experience is pretty frustrating, confusing, and often miserable.

Because we're not really looking at life in its fullness, we're just getting a tiny snippet, tiny bits and pieces, and not really seeing the whole of what's actually going on.

Because when we're too wrapped up in ourselves, too wrapped up in what we're currently getting or not, at the very least, we miss the perspective that a longer view can give us. That actually maybe getting everything we want isn't the best thing for us right now. Maybe we actually need to be frustrated and disappointed.

Maybe there's more to life than just our own personal gain. Maybe we need to learn how to give. Maybe we need to learn how to share. Maybe we need to learn that there are ways of improving our lives, oftentimes dramatically so, that actually have nothing to do with material gain. That have nothing to do with material achievement. That actually have nothing to do with anything measurable on the outside of us.

But we'll never find these things until we look, and sometimes we don't look until we're forced to. No one looks very hard at themselves when everything seems to be going great.

But that's the funny thing about going through challenges in life, without a longer view, we not only can't see the gain we actually achieved,

but we actually see things as unjust and cruel, or the very least arbitrary and random, but it's our awareness of the longer view that delivers us the clarity that we need in order to grow.

Because one of the things we spot when we take a longer view of our lives, is that things aren't chaotic and random. Oftentimes, they're actually pretty predictable. That we see these patterns play out over and over again, and we start to spot these patterns, that's where we can use these amazing minds of ours,

this amazing intellect that we have to start to draw some ideas about why. Because that's the thing, in order to grow, in order to do something different, oftentimes we have to think different thoughts. And in order to think different thoughts, we first have to have our perspectives expanded.

That in any given moment, we are acting with the consciousness we currently have. In that if we want change, oftentimes our consciousness needs to be expanded first. Because that's the thing that's driving the behavior in the first place, that's the thing that is creating the intent that the behavior is flowing from.

In order to have something different, we have to want something different. In order to want something different, we have to know something different.

And life is like this in so many different ways. In so many different ways, our lives are the extension of something else. That our behavior in the world is an extension of the belief system and the consciousness that we currently have. And the belief system and the consciousness that we currently have has been built by our thinking around the experiences that we've had prior to that. And the experiences that we've had prior to that were based on whatever our consciousness and beliefs were at that time.

And it keeps going and going. Life is always moving forward. It's always moving from wherever we are right now. And when we want to change that trajectory, we really have to understand what brought us to this point in the first place.

We also have to understand what we'd want to change and why. We have to understand ourselves. If we want to create a new intent, really have to understand our prior intents first.

There's no way around it. We can't achieve any expression that isn't a reflection of where our consciousness is. It's always a match. We're always getting back exactly what we're currently being.

And so when we take the longer view of life, we start to see these patterns and these patterns start to inform this awareness of ourselves,

this awareness of what we really think, what we really believe. Believe about the world, believe about ourselves. And when we take a long enough view of our lives, we can see these patterns play out. We can trace these ends back to their origins.

We can gain the awareness of how life works by understanding how our life has worked. By really understanding our role in what's happened. Really understanding what we actually want, what we have wanted, what we've needed. And when we move forward from this awareness, we can choose which wants and needs we want to feed.

Because that's the justice in all of this. That if it's intent that undergirds everything, if intent is the root causation of life, then we must have some agency in what we intend.

In order for life to not be completely deterministic and predefined, in order for us to actually be here to create something, we must have the ability to set our own intent. We must have some sort of steering wheel, some sort of way to adjust the trajectory and experience of our life.

And we find this through discovering the power of intent. Discovering all the ways we've used our intention to create the things we've experienced. But again, this awareness only comes through with a much longer view of life.

This awareness only comes through by getting out of our reactivity, getting out of our need to do something, anything as quickly as possible. We have to build up the courage to pause. We have to develop the discipline to question. We have to develop the ability to really bring full awareness into our lives, and to every part of it we possibly can, and then work to keep expanding it forever.

So when we take a much longer view of our life, when we get comfortable with not needing to know, not needing to act. When we can dwell on gathering information and trust that when the clarity comes, it'll be obvious.

And if we're looking at some aspect of our lives, and it isn't currently obvious, that's a really good indication that we need more information. That there's something we don't understand, often something fundamental we don't understand.

That we can use our confusion as a guide to how much we actually know about the problem we're trying to solve. To how well we actually know the question we're trying to answer.

Because when we step through our own reactivity, when we step through into a greater awareness, into a fuller knowing about our own lives,

the deeper and fuller our awareness is, the deeper and fuller the clarity is. And the deeper than the fuller, the clarity is the more trustworthy it gets.

That if we can find the trust, if we can find the faith to just keep learning, keep paying attention, know that when the answers come, they will be obvious.

But if it's not obvious right now, then we need to keep listening, keep paying attention, keep going, step by step,

knowing that with enough attention, enough honesty, enough courage, enough faith, the clarity we seek, the change we want, the feeling that we're going after, will emerge on its own.

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