Prime Path 31:
The Blind Spot
The first thing you need to do, now that we're talking about you, is to get where you are.
Let's review what we mean by this.
If you want to get moving in your life, the first thing you need to do is get where you are. By this I mean that you need to tell the truth about yourself and your life, to a workable, functional degree. Telling this truth will, in effect, get your feet in the starting blocks. If you don't do this, at least to a workable degree, then you're stuck, and you will never get anywhere.
This is big medicine. Telling the truth about yourself and the real nature of your circumstances can be a remarkably powerful undertaking. Failing to tell the truth is often the fundamental problem. Sometimes, telling the truth about yourself and your life is all you need to do to supercharge your growth and really get moving in the direction of a full, rich life.
That's great! But you and I: we've got to handle a couple of issues if we're going to get this done.
Our first problem is that I don't know you personally. I know about people in general, but I don't know you. So, sure, I am going to bring up things that I know about you, because I know about people, and you are one of them.
However, the ideas I am going to bring out might lack impact, and they definitely lack intimacy, given that you are reading these words on paper or a screen. I get this. It's the kind of thing that can cause this coaching to lose effectiveness. The thing is, though, there's nothing I can do about it, so we're going to have to do the best we can. We can get this done. But it's going to take real engagement on your end.
This leads us to our other problem, and it's even bigger. You see, I'm not necessary if we're going to get you where you are, but you are. If we're going to get you where you are, you are essential.
So, now, I'm going to tell you one of the things that I know about you. It's our other, bigger problem:
You have a blind spot when it comes to accurately perceiving yourself and the quality of your life. Your awareness is clouded, so to speak. For the most part, you don't see yourself as you are, and, when it comes to issues connected with the quality of your life, you don't see your life as it is. You see bits and pieces, but you don't see the big picture. Not really. And this is a major problem that you have when it comes to generating a life of the highest quality.
Now, let's hold our horses. We're going to pause on that last idea, because it's a big one. Let's set it out again, in the first person, and if you would, read it aloud for me, OK?
I have a blind spot when it comes to accurately perceiving myself and the quality of my life. My awareness is clouded, so to speak. For the most part, I don't see myself as I am, and, when it comes to issues connected with the quality of my life, I don't see my life as it is. I see bits and pieces, but I don't see the big picture. Not really. This is a major problem for me when it comes to generating a life of the highest quality.
We're going to talk about this blind spot in more depth at other places in SkyVillage. But the bottom line explanation for your blind spot concerning yourself is:
You are being what you are.
and:
Being what you are is different from being aware of what you are.
Hold the phone! That's a big idea. Do me a favor, and say that aloud for me:
Being what I am is different from being aware of what I am.
(Thank you!)
Let's see if I can explain this. Metaphorically, you could say that you look at life, and operate with respect to your life, from who and what you are. As such, your true nature and operations as a being are, for the most part, outside of your field of vision. It's like trying to see your own eyes. Because you look from your eyes, you can't see them directly, and because you operate into life from yourself as a being, you can't directly see who and what you are.
This lack of perception means that, most of the time, when it comes to the way that you are, you manage your operations--that is, you generate that which gives rise to your conduct--blindly and mechanically. You don't perceive the way you are, which means that you don't observe the way that you are, or discern the way that you are, or contemplate the way that you are, because, in an odd but real way, you aren't really consciously aware of your nature and qualities as a being. You just are.
This lack of awareness isn't limited to your knowledge of yourself. You see, one of the ideas that we are going to explore in depth in this website is that, overwhelmingly, everything of significance in your life flows from who and what you are as a being. (In fact, the very idea of significance itself flows from who and what you are as a being.) That means that, overwhelmingly, the stuff that we do, and the stuff that we have, is effectively, and really, a function of who and what we are. Overwhelmingly, in fact--and this is a nugget of seriously senior coaching--reality itself shows up in accord with who and what you are. These ideas might sound weird now, but I suspect that there's a part of you that, at some level, gets what I am saying. We'll dig into these ideas in great depth down the road.
So, it's time, here and now, to introduce to you the single biggest coaching idea of this entire website. This idea underlies everything else that you'll run across here.
Overwhelmingly, the quality of your life shows up in accord with who and what you are as a being.
(Don't worry about fully understanding or remembering this now. We'll dig into this idea in more depth later.)
So, like we said, you are basically blind when it comes to who and what you are as a being, which means that you are basically blind when it comes to the big issues relative to the quality of your life. What I mean is that while you can undoubtedly list as a factual matter the things you do and the things you have, you remain relatively blind concerning the big picture, which is, how all these things show up and fit in in terms of the generation of a life of authentic quality.
But get this--it's tricky. In "getting you where you are", we've been identifying your barriers to getting where you are. The tricky part is, the problem is that you are unaware of the blind spot itself--that is, you are blind as to your blind spot. Your unawareness of the blind spot itself is where you are. Tricky, right?
We can set up a metaphor to make our point clearer. Let's say that, if you want to get a good look at yourself and the quality of your life, you need to look through a certain window. Let's say that window blinds are drawn and closed across this window, such that you can't make out anything through the window. Well, here's the way you've been: you've been looking at the closed blinds and operating as if the closed blinds themselves are a view of yourself and the quality of your life. Obviously, if you want to get a look at yourself and the quality of your life through the window, you have to open the blinds. But you can't do that unless and until you recognize and acknowledge the existence of the blinds in the first place. In other words, you can't open the blinds if you don't see the blinds, and recognize them as blinds. You need to get the way things are--blinds are blocking your vision--before you can reach out and open them, so that you can see out of the window.
There are metaphorical closed blinds between, first, your ability to observe and perceive, and, second, yourself and the quality of your life. We call these blinds "the blind spot." The problem is, you are generally unaware of the existence of the blind spot itself. If we are going to get you where you are--if we're going to afford you a good view of yourself and the quality of your life--then we're going to have to look behind the blinds. In order to look behind the blinds, the first thing we first need to do is to recognize that they exist.
That's where you are, right now: your vision of yourself and the quality of your life is concealed behind a blind spot of which you haven't been aware.
And, yes, we're going to shift that sentence to the first person, and ask you to read it out loud:
My vision of myself and the quality of my life is concealed behind a blind spot of which I haven't been aware.
This isn't bad, and this isn't wrong. This is just the way it is.
Now, in order for you to get where you are, for real, I want you to look at the blind spot. To do this, try and look at yourself, as a being. What kind of person are you? What is your nature, as a being? What is the nature of your operations, as a being? How do you make choices? Where do your thoughts come from? How do other people experience you? What are your strengths? What are your weaknesses? When you look at yourself, and who you really are, what do you see?
Now, consider the overall quality of your life. How close to a rich, full life is your current experience? Are you manifesting your highest capacities? Are you realizing your potential? What is the quality of your relationships? Can you describe your best life in some detail? What is standing between you and living your best life? What are your most cherished dreams? Are you living them? Why not?
When you ask these questions of yourself, you are seeing the blind spot we have been discussing. Look directly at it. Look at it's blankness and emptiness, and maybe, behind that, it's confusion, distortion, obscuration, concealment, and perhaps even a degree of struggle and discomfort. There it is! That's how this blind spot shows up.
The blankness and emptiness, and the underlying aberrant feelings, are the "blinds" that are drawn across the window that looks out to your soul.
So, the trouble is, you have a blind spot. And you've been unaware of the fact that this blind spot exists, and the way that it shows up. That's not bad. That's not wrong. It just doesn't work.
And so, the last piece of this particular puzzle is easy. You need to be able to tell the working truth about yourself and the quality of your life if you are going to live a life of the highest quality. That means that you need to be aware of this blind spot, so as to (maybe) see around it, or see through it, or somehow move it aside, so to speak, so you can observe yourself, and assess the quality of your life. This is necessary if you want to generate a life of the highest quality.
So, again, this is what we've been doing: we've been getting where you are about getting where you are. You can start "getting where you are" by acknowledging this: that you have a blind spot when it comes to yourself as a being, and you have an accordant blind spot when it comes to important issues relative to the quality of your life.
This blind spot was the first thing about which we needed to tell the truth concerning where you are.
We'll look at this blind spot again in SkyVillage, but, for now, that's enough of that.
So, now, so that you can get where you are, and so that you can get moving in your life, let's open these blinds, and take a cold, hard, clear look at the first thing that we need to address:
We need to observe, assess, and obtain clarity regarding the quality of your life.
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