“Experience is not what happens to you, it’s what you do with what happens to you.” —Aldous Huxley
1: “An extrovert walks into a party and sees a different room than an introvert does,” David Brooks writes in his book: How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.
“A person who has been trained as an interior designer sees a different room than someone who’s been trained as a security specialist,” David notes.
We all possess a subjective consciousness that makes us, us. It integrates our “memories, attitudes, beliefs, convictions, traumas, loves, fears, desires, and goals into our own distinct way of seeing,” David writes.
“Our mind creates a world, with beauty and ugliness, excitement, tedium, friends, and enemies,” he notes. “People don’t see the world with their eyes; they see it with their entire life.”
Cognitive scientists have created a term, “constructionism,” for this understanding of human consciousness that is backed up by 50 years of brain research: We do not “passively take in reality,” David writes. “Each person actively constructs their own perception of reality.”
Yes, there is an objective reality, but we only have our subjective access to it.
“The mind is its own place,” the poet John Milton writes, “and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”
2: Therapist Irvin Yalom was leading a group therapy session. He asked one of his patients to write a summary of each meeting.
“When he read her reports, Irvin realized that she experienced each session radically differently than he did. She never even heard the supposedly brilliant insights he thought he was sharing with the group.
“Instead, she noticed the small personal acts—the way one person complimented another’s clothing, the way someone apologized for being late.
“In other words, we may be at the same event together, but we’re each having our own experience of it.
“Or, as the writer Anaïs Nin put it, ‘We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are.’”
The reality is there are layers of reality. There is the objective reality of what occurs, and there is the subjective reality of how what occurs is seen, experienced, and made meaningful.
The meaning we make is often the more important layer. “Well-being depends less on objective events than on how those events are perceived, dealt with, and shared with others,” says Yale psychologist Marc Brackett.
This second layer is also where we want to focus in our pursuit of understanding other people.
3: “The crucial question is not, David writes, ‘What happened to this person? or ‘What are the items on their résumé?’
“Instead, we should ask: ‘How does this person see things?” “How do they construct their reality?’
“This,” David notes, “is what we really want to know if we want to understand another person.”
How do we go about this pursuit?
“As we try to understand other people, we want to be constantly asking ourselves,” David suggests: “How are they perceiving this situation? How are they experiencing this moment? How are they constructing their reality?”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: What challenges or surprises me about having only subjective access to objective reality?
Action: Discuss with a family member, friend, or colleague.
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