It’s not what I say, it’s what you hear.
When I was growing up, and my father would offer his advice and suggestions, he always concluded by asking me what I heard him say, not what he said. Most of the time, I heard my defiant voice actively discounting his every word. However, the principle stuck with me. When I am communicating with people, I am constantly aware that I am using a unique lexicon built upon my subjective life. When I am trying to convey meaning, I draw upon a linguistic landscape, constructed from cultural associations and abstractions that we know as language.
"How we remember, what we remember, and why we remember form the most personal map of our individuality." -Christina Baldwin
Maps are created through data collected from our senses. When stimuli reaches our attention, it has gone through neurological and linguistic filters. Creating beliefs, judgments, and associations defining our map. Data, and/or stimuli, can be seen like water flowing down a mountain, creating channels along its path. We have the ability to step out of the water, to see the map, and to create aqueducts for controlling the flow. When something happens in my life, my brain processes this event. How that process is happening is based on a lifetime of imprinting, but is not confined to it. Introspection allows for dictation and direction of the process. History is doomed to repeat itself unless we can rewrite our history. Our pasts only inform the present moment, but does not control it. If we can see our maps, we can change them.
Jason Silva has a Shot of Awe, where he talks of “hacking subjectivity”. He explains experience as the, ‘evanescent flux of sensation and perception’. He goes on to say; “if we want to hack experience, we have to hack attention. Attention will deconstruct our consciousnesses and tweak our perceptual apparatuses to engineer a kind of neural-nirvana”.
