Notice the view taking shape
Explore what attention brings forward and what a different perspective could reveal.
Perception & perspective
A look, a memory, an expectation. Before you put them into words, the moment already has meaning. Your inner map is being drawn while you use it.
In perception, The Hidden Hero’s Journey™ explores that making: what receives attention, what expectation adds, and how a possible explanation becomes the view you live by.
The weather changes what you can see of a landscape. Fog hides the distance. Strong light makes one detail vivid and leaves another in shadow. The landscape has not vanished, but your view of it has changed.
Your attention and current state take part in seeing too. So do the expectations you bring.
We call this territory Sky. Its weather helps you recognise the conditions in which your inner picture forms, while keeping the world you are looking at in view.
Where information is missing, imagination often fills the distance. The Fog Bank gives that moment a name: where does what you know end, and what you expect begin?
Pressure can make one possible outcome look urgent and inevitable. The Storm Cloud helps you notice that pressure alongside the facts.
And a horizon reminds you that what you can see depends on where you stand. Another person, a new skill or a piece of information may let you see a route that was hidden from here.
Meteorology of the Mind is the planned deep dive into how a view comes into being. Its nine-chapter direction follows attention, framing, uncertainty and the possibilities that become visible as your vantage point changes.
Stories can offer more than one view of the same event. Poetry, reflection and practical exploration help you notice your own map-making and take part in revising it.
You can change the meaning you give an event, the detail you attend to or the question you ask next. Each can change your experience and the action that follows.
The event still deserves an honest account. A useful revision includes more of what is there, even when it complicates the story you hoped to tell.
Darling, you can take yourself seriously and still ask another question.
Choose an everyday situation whose meaning interests you. Describe what happened in your journal or notes, including your response. Give the moment enough detail to recognise it before trying to explain it.
Now map the ingredients of your view. What did you notice directly? What did you remember? What did you expect would happen? How tired, hurried or at ease were you? You can draw connections or use separate lines of text.
Look at the explanation that formed from these ingredients. What does it bring into focus? What might it leave outside? Add one relevant detail or possible explanation that deserves a closer look.
What could help you find out more? Choose a question, an observation or another perspective to seek. If you redraw part of the map, name what supports the change. A more comforting story is not the only possible discovery.
Close your notes and return to your surroundings. Choose when to come back if the question needs time. Your map can remain a work in progress while you go on with your day.
Seeing how a view forms gives you somewhere to begin. These capacities help you notice your perspective, examine what thought is doing and let your understanding change through contact with what you can find out.
Explore what attention brings forward and what a different perspective could reveal.
Perception & perspectiveRecognise the contribution of memory, expectation and repeated thought to the picture you are using.
MetacognitionCompare an interpretation with what you can observe, ask and try.
Reality literacyA thought can follow an intricate route and still return to the same conclusion. We use the image of an orbit to notice that relationship: much movement around a centre that remains unchanged.
Has another look brought a new detail or a different question? Some things need returning to. Others need something that another round of thinking cannot supply.
Ask the question, then let the answer arrive. Even the awkward part. Even the detail that spoils your very elegant explanation.
A clearer view might feel relieving. It might give you a firmer reason to act. Either way, you get to meet more of the life in front of you.
A view comes with feeling. The domain of emotional life explores what that feeling needs and the conditions in which it changes. Its garden image gives another way to understand the world you are living within.
Welcome to the I AWAKE universe. I'm Dawn and I'm your personal concierge. Ask me anything and I'll do my best to guide you in this space.
