Several times this week, I experimented with the suggested practice of taking different perspectives — particularly, holding more than one perspective at a time. I had intended to write about this but have been too busy to spend any quality time doing so. I just wanted to post a note tonight, before the call, about my experiences with this practice.
I found I flipped around a lot among different sorts of “perspective-taking” experiments, so I didn’t go very deeply into any. I couldn’t decide which I wanted to follow — which might prove productive for exploring field dynamics. I will still experiment with this. In general, I found the exercises I chose, while “mind-bending” in some ways (and sometimes headache inducing!), nevertheless seemed to reinforce the sense of the field rather than challenge it in any way. Which may have been the purpose! At least the sense of an inescapable-seeming, all-organizing field actually emerged on a few occasions.
Here are some things I tried:
* Viewing myself from a position above my head while walking, or variations on that:Â trying to imaginatively hold a 360 degree view, or a bi-directional view, or sometimes a highly mobile, “swooping” view as from a kite while I also walked calmly and steadily.
* Changing temporal frames, such as imagining the felt sense of my body from an earlier time while also paying attention to current feelings and sights. Sometimes I recalled walks from the past, in distant places, and attended to them while also being mindful of the present. A small-scale version of this was to imaginatively inhabit the “space” a minute or two ahead of me while also paying attention to my present footsteps.
* Taking an imagined “bug’s eye view” from within trees while also walking past them, so I was seeing and feeling close-up views of tree-top branches and leaves while also walking in the parking lot below.
* Paying attention to smell and sound simultaneously, and relying less on vision.
* Trying to feel expanded and contracted at the same time.
* Identifying with the pale moon in the sky — doing subject-object reversal with it, so that I was observing my tiny body walking the earth’s surface while I also tried to be mindful of my normal-scale surroundings.
In all of these exercises, there was a feeling of bending something that couldn’t be — or resisted being — broken.
Bruce