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A Spectrum of Meaning and Understanding

Subjective meaning embraces our likes and dislikes, thoughts, feelings, sensations, opinions, judgements – it is an essential part of our humanity living, and moving in the world as we do.

Objective understanding is being interested in why and who we are + why and who others are, not just as humans but as part of a holistic, interconnected universe.

Let’s start with the world around us. We all notice day and night with the rise of the sun (even if its hidden behind clouds), dawn, light of day, sunset, dusk, fall of night and time of darkness. It’s a natural spectrum with day and night, light and dark at it’s far ends. As humans though we generally move in the light of day and experience this as ‘normal’. But night is equally important as a time for us to rest and recuperate while other creatures and plants enjoy the darkness to be active.

Yet, instead of simply accepting day and night, light and dark as a spectrum in this amazing planet we may impose our own meaning and label them:

• Day good, night bad
• Day positive, night negative
• Day comfortable, night uncomfortable

And we can add to that a sense of:

• Right and Wrong

Of course we may have a natural preference for day or night (subjective meaning) but recognising both as essential helps evolve our wider comprehension.

So we need to be wary of ‘truth’ or ‘facts’ that come from our conditioning. We can enjoy them as opinions and judgements based on sensations and feelings from experience (memory and habit) or imagination (expectation and assumption) while appreciating that other perspectives are also valid.

Creating dualities moves us away from objective understanding and appreciating the whole of the spectrum between dualities. If we inflict our individual interpretation (meaning) onto our surroundings, we can become ‘trapped’ in a conditioned ‘wisdom’ (or ‘non-wisdom’) of fears, attachments, habits, desires and aversions (likes and dislikes) that may close us to curiosity, opportunities, adaptability and growth.

At a more social, interactive level we often find ourselves gravitating towards people who collude with our way of seeing the world. It then becomes easy to adopt our interpretation or perspective as ‘truth’ leading us into judgement, self-righteousness and rejection of other people’s ways of doing and being. Or it can result in us ‘advising’ people and telling them how to live their lives from our own experience which may or may not take their unique psyche into consideration.

So, how do we change this programming and begin to celebrate the whole spectrum of meaning AND understanding?

Let’s start by recognising sensations, feelings, emotions, thoughts as our individual subjective meaning, important but not the whole story, and not necesarily the same story for another.

Looking both within and beyond to the outer world:

What if we greet each day as completely new and every reaction, interaction and reaction in relationships with awareness and interest?

What if we adopt an attitude of curiosity and exploration in each encounter with a person, event or happening?

What if we always stay fascinated and open to revelation in this amazing miraculous life journey that we are all on?

This is our incredible, exciting Yoga challenge!