I've recently been reading about phenomenology.
Literally,
phenomenology is the study of "phenomena": appearances of things, or
things as they appear in our experience, or the ways we experience
things, thus the meanings things have in our experience. Phenomenology
studies conscious experience as experienced from the subjective or
first person point of view. (source)
I am not an academic nor scientist (yet), but this is the primary way I gain information. I start with observation - of myself, of others, of my interactions with others, of the world - and I look for explanations. This is different from the scientific method or starting with a question and then going on to prove or not prove it.
Anyway, I digress. I wanted to write about a conversation I had a few months about, about a cockroach on a loaf of bread. I want to believe that we create our world. Now, the problem with that is there is this mutual reality and it's harsh sometimes. At the same time, you see what you pay attention to seeing. And people miss seeing a lot of things. (Pls Note: the Gorilla in the basketball game, your blind spot and the fact that our eyes perceive the world "upside-down"). So where is the line between hard reality and the reality/world we create?
I don't know the answer to that question. And I'm not sure I necessarily have any leads - but this is my favorite thing to think about, observe the world for more data and attempt to unravel. A few months back, I had an interesting experience, that led to a detailed conversation on how I see us composing the world.
We had a problem with a rat getting into the house, and he had chewed through the plastic on a loaf of bread. I was trying to find where the rat was coming in, so I placed the bread in a strategic location to gather more data (before I attempted to kill him). We left the house for several and left the light on in the kitchen. I made note of how much chewing occurred on the bread before we left.
When we came back, I went into the kitchen for something and glanced over at the bread. There was a big fuzzy black spot over the area that had been chewed through. I stood there for a moment looking at it - not knowing what I was seeing. Then a feeling like the world flipped and I realized it was a huge cockroach on the hole eating the bread. I was surprised by the size of the cockroach. One, I don't think I have ever seen a cockroach in California, and two this one was the size of the ones I had seen in Brazil. And I immediately thought/compared of that Brazilian cockroach. Whether the thought of the Brazilian cockroach came before or after I identified the thing on the bread as a cockroach, I couldn't say. It was quasi-instantaneous.
Once I identified the cockroach, I called to the boyfriend to check out this crazy thing. He came over and after we identified what it was (I think I said, hey - it's a cockroach!) we started thinking about how to kill it. Well, actually he went about killing it.
Now, this probably sounds like an ordinary experience. Nothing strange about it - except maybe the size of the cockroach- but I saw it differently. Let me explain.
First, I didn't know what I was looking at. For a quite long time, I could not identify what I "saw". I really saw a darkish blob on the bread - and the kitchen light was on - the kitchen was not dark in any way. My sensory input told me there was something different on the bread, but I couldn't tell you what it was - yet.
It took me a moment to identify what I was looking at. How did I do this? How did I know what it was? And how did I know what to call/name it?
The way I explain it, is my brain went through it's database of images/identifiers until it found sufficient information to make a match or suggest something. How it searched? I don't know. I'm a visual person, I suppose it found the brazilian cockroach memory that linked it to the cockroach word and that's when I identified it and said in my mind - oh, it's a cockroach.
The strange thing is that this did take a noticeable amount of time. Usually when we identify something, it is immediate. A word. Chair. Empire State Building. King Kong. (See whorehouse scene in The Purple Rose of Cairo.)
But in this case, I did not immediately identify it. And I got to "see/perceive" what the thing was, before my brain pigeonholed the perception into a definition.
Now, here is where I will sound like a crazy person. I had to use my database to identify the cockroach. My database contains items I have been taught, commanded to learn, learned, etc from this reality. The cockroach is a definition of this reality.
Now, I do believe (and I suppose this is based on faith, because I haven't directly experienced this enough to assuage my skepticism) that there are multiple worlds. Multiple worlds of perception and beyond perception - other worlds. And I believe they exist simultaneously, right now. Like different TV channels. Only you can only tune into one at a time. If you want to tune into another TV channel, you first have to realize that there are other channels, and only then, can you start to understand the TV, what a channel is, and who is holding the remote control (and can you get it away from them).
But let's not get distracted by these otherworldly possibilities. I don't live in those worlds. I live in this one, where the cockroach is sitting on a loaf of bread in my kitchen.
Which leads me to my next point.
"Between stimulus and response, there is a space.
In that space is our power to choose our response.
In our response lies our growth and our freedom."
I've finally identified the cockroach - now what am I going to do about it? Here my database comes in handy again. Not only does my database include identification modules, but it also includes "approved reactions" to a variety of situations. Approved responses can be any number of things - social morals (women must stay home and raise children, homosexuality is bad), things we were taught (eat with your silverware, not fingers), things we were commanded to learn (the alpha-bet, the pledge of allegiance) to other things we pick up along the way (or inherited from family, parents, teachers, peers).
Back to the cockroach, I go to my database and pick an approved reaction. But first, do I really have the ability to choose? What about the reaction. Re-Action. Doing an action again. Like picking the action from a database. Not much awareness in that, is there? Maybe so, maybe not.
Here's the space where the phrase above tells you of your choice.
Reaction is not choosing your response. Reaction is going to your database and responding to the item in the pre-scribed way- or one of your prescribed ways without pausing to decide how to act.
Response is choosing the response. You can stick pick the response from your database, or you can do something outside your database. (More on this later. This is a fractyl hole that I love falling into, especially when it mobius flips. See: Zen detachment, controlled folly, Respond-ability)
The difference between a reaction and a response (my terminology above) is only known to the individual. (The feeling is different.) The outcome could appear exactly the same. Let's go back to the cockroach. There are a variety of approved reactions in my database. I could have jumped, screamed, immediately smashed it, reached for insect killer - any of these are perfectly acceptable responses. But instead, what I watched. I was curious - curious about the cockroach, my response to the cockroach and myself. In the pause that I decided to be curious, I could have easily decided to grab the first thing at hand and smash it. And I almost did that, but I saw the opportunity to turn the cockroach on the bread into something more than taking care of household pests.
That self-observation - feedback loop is right there in the bottom circle, and for me - it directly feeds back into my database - further educating my database, aka the memory of my life experiences. Next time I have an interaction with a cockroach, I can utilize my new to my database experience. This is one reason why I self-observe, question, analyze and watch the world around me. To update my database. (Another reason, is to identify where the data in my database came from - because I don't necessarily agree with everything in it.)
So in creating, updating, using my database, I do create my world. Or perhaps I re-create the world in the image I would like it to be. And isn't that the sentiment of "be the change you would like to see"?
