99 steps to reclaiming your individuality Step# 46

Observing is the paradigm shift:

If we could revisit a point made in the previous step and expand on it, maybe that would clarify more succinctly the framing of the term "Observer" as it pertains to our utilization of it as a marker in this course. In an unenlightened state we view the individual as an encapsulated manifestation of the self. And activities acting on it, (the self) as either external or internal. External being the sensory processing of stimuli, and internally the rationalizing of both the stimuli and the causal nature of it. When we process this information, the normative response is to use the sum combined faculty of the self, ignoring what we have established earlier on in the course as the many "natured" state of the self. The term "unenlightened" here should infer no derogation on the individual, or no deficit in faculty, but simply a state of unawareness as to the many causal natures at play that are being combined to present the synoptic analysis to the individual that is engaged in the process. It was necessary to revisit those previously discussed points, to bring our focus back to the key grounding points of this course, that we are the many in the one.

We hopefully have progressed so far thus, that this notion of the many selves is no longer an obscure or peculiar state of reasoning, but simply a concise way of framing the interactiveness of the machinations that produce the entity known as the individual, known as you. The Observer is the refined and incorporated aspect of the "neutral state" we were introduced to in step number five. It is the culmination of what was discussed in great detail back then as the point when a seeming quantum shift occurs, and the psyche manifests the observer consciousness as an integral part of our reasoning faculty.

The observer state adds quality to our lives and enriches our interactiveness with others because; just as no man is an island unto himself, when we incorporate the observer state in our own deductive reasoning, it also manifests itself in our interactive reasoning of others. How does it differ from our normal reasoning capacities you ask? When we reason for instance on the occurrence in our lives of a less than favourable outcome. We may ask ourselves: Why it failed, where the responsibility for the failure lies, was the failure preventable, and if so why was that not apparent to ourselves. The observer state on the other hand focuses not on the specific problems, not on justification or corrective behaviour, but on the nature behind them. Not on the failure, but on the value of dealing with failure in our lives. Not on the emotional support of, or justification for failure, or the correction for future events of failed engagements, but on the acknowledgement that it was an event, indifferent of its manifest impact on us emotionally or psychologically, not an arbiter of outcomes but an unbiased acknowledger of them.

To truly experience the benefit of the observer state, one must have experienced the occurrence of it in their lives, words or explanations do it little justice. It is like trying to explain the thrill of skydiving and somehow expecting the explanation to act as a surrogate for the experience itself. If you are starting to grasp the nature of this course, then you will have, or soon will have experienced in your life the shift in outcomes when you ponder the activity of the observer in your quest.