How to Look at the World Differently

There exists a spiritual principle that can be validated in our individual experience. It says, “As within, so without.”

This principle amounts to saying that our individual experience of the world is determined largely by the way we look at the world. If we start from there, it follows that if we want to improve our experience of the world, we have to change the way we look at the world.

Those of us who experiment with changing the way we look at the world immediately run into a fundamental difficulty. We don’t know how we look at the world!

I begin my book, Hoodwinked: Uncovering Our Fundamental Superstitions, with a parable about a fish in water. The fish doesn’t know about water because water is all he’s ever known. He’s never seen the water; he just looks through it at whatever he’s observing. The water in this parable represents our understanding of the world. We look through, and not at, our understanding of the world. It’s transparent, like the water the fish swims in.

We never think about how we look at the world, because it’s all we’ve ever known.

And the way we look at ourselves, at life, at the world, our entire belief system, is based on this transparent understanding.

One way I’ve found to look at the world differently is to become aware of the “water” I swim in. “Well,” you may ask, “How do I do that?”

I’ve learned two useful techniques for becoming aware of how I look at the world. The first technique involves becoming aware of my internal dialog. Example: You consider one of your problems. You talk to yourself about it. You discuss the pros and cons of one or more possible solutions to it. You hear yourself talking about it, and the voice you hear is yours. That’s you speaking “inside your head,” isn’t it? It’s sometimes called the internal dialog, and all of us engage in it.

But is that really you? Is that your voice? It sure sounds like you… but what if it’s not? What if that internal dialog is simply playing out in your mind and you are just listening to it, just witnessing it? I have discovered that I can listen to that voice as it describes the way I look at the world! That’s IT describing the world, not me! In fact, I’ve come to realize that IT is not me at all. I think of IT as the sum total of my cultural learning. I call IT the Ego.

The second useful technique I’ve found to show me how I look at the world is the understanding of “self limiting beliefs.” Self limiting beliefs are those that restrict the range of options I have in my experience of living.

Let me use a metaphor to explain what I mean. Let me ask you to visualize an old-time movie theater. Those of you who are too young to have experienced a film-based movie theater, bear with me!

What are the elements of a film-based movie house? First, before we turn on the projector, we have a big white screen. That screen has no content; it’s just a place to focus our attention when we get some content going. Next, we have a light bulb that projects pure white light onto the screen.

Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

OK, so we have white light and a white screen. So far, it’s a really boring movie! The last element is the film, which gets threaded into the projector. The film allows us to project the movie onto the screen. It does that by blocking, or filtering out, various frequencies of light at various points on the film and allowing all the other frequencies to pass through it. So, the visual portion of the movie is created by a process of removing some of the light. And what’s left is what we see on the screen.

This metaphor can show us that the world we experience is the result of removing possibilities from those we might otherwise experience, just as the film removes a portion of the light that would otherwise hit the screen. And those possibilities are removed by our attachment to self limiting beliefs.

Another spiritual principle is “You change your experience by changing your story.” This amounts to getting rid of self limiting beliefs, or by replacing them with beliefs that serve you better. You put the Ego in the backseat and you drive!

Doing so is a process, and it requires clear intent and persistence. It turns out, though, that simply by becoming aware of how we look at the world, it begins to happen quite naturally. And as it does, we gain confidence that our experience can change for the better, and we become reacquainted with the joy of discovering our new way of experiencing life.

Let’s get started! Let’s find out how to look at the world differently! For more, check out the rest of the Insights Blog.