DE-OBJECTIFICATION

When asked what he thought of Western Civilization, Mahatma Gandhi is said to have replied: "I think that sounds like a very good idea!"

We see de-objectification as an important inner capacity for us each to develop on the path towards creating a society worthy of being called truly civilized.

Objectification is often understood in terms of the crude version of it that women in many world cultures are often subjected to.  This, of course, is already a big issue that needs to be dealt with - and in terms of what we mean by objectification - it is only one of the tips of a huge iceberg of human suffering caused by widespread objectification.

It typically only takes a second or two after we are born for the onslaught of objectification to start with "it's a girl" or "it's a boy".  If it was a simple biological observation this would be harmless.  But the world we have been born into has its own ideas and expectations about what being a girl or being a boy means.  

This is not to suggest that gender doesn't exist - but rather that it is something alive.  Not something dead.  And all of the ideas in all of our minds are dead.  If one wants to meet - and learn to live from - the dynamic living energy of own's own being, then one must go naked into the darkness - alone.  Naked without any ideas.  Alone without any expectations or preconceptions.

The burden of others' expectations quickly extends well beyond gender - into all sorts of other directions depending on who our parents are, and what culture they are unconsciously enacting.  And before we have any capacity to think for ourselves our authenticity is being buried by others' projections, expectations and assumptions.

Because this occurs when we are very young and dependent our full authenticity never really has a chance.  We need the love of our caregivers; and so we do our best to shape our self into whatever shape we think will earn their love.  Or in more desperate situations, into whatever shape will minimize the pain.

By the time we are adults most of us have disconnected from much of our core energy and alienated ourselves from our deep self.

But still the onslaught of objectification doesn't end:  Even as adults, other people are more or less constantly objectifying us in terms of roles - such as our current job - and mental categories - such as intelligent or extroverted or some Enneagram type, astrological sign, or Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).

It is not that mental categories have no validity.  Many do.  Like training wheels meant to be worn on one's first bike for a few weeks - they serve a purpose.  But in our culture the tendency is to keep the training wheels on for far far too long.  At first training wheels help.  Soon however, they just get in the way and inhibit our further development.

Following in the questionable footsteps of so called 'Western Civilization' - people from almost all of the world's cultures are increasingly becoming dominated by their left-brains:

Collectively we are becoming so addicted to overlaying mental categories over our perception that we scarcely have the capacity to see freshly anymore.  Most of us don't even notice that we are NOT actually paying attention to our direct experience, moment-by-moment-by-moment?  

Perhaps the most damaging outcome of being subjected to so many projections from others is that we unconsciously learn to relate to ourselves as an object.  It is amazing that it is even possible for us to be hypnotized  into relating to ourselves as anything other than pure subjectivity.  And yet most of us think that we are a thing - an object.  It is almost an unchallengeable assumption that we are each a small thing in a big world.

I invite you, for a moment, to instead consider that:

You are what is aware.  And if you really pay close attention you will notice that you aren't sure if what is aware is in the world, or outside of it, or everywhere or nowhere?

Any object that you or anyone else can think of or perceive is less than the full you.  The full you can not be conceptualized by you or anyone else.  Any and everything you or anyone else believes about you is a flat dead plastic black-and-white version of the real living breathing reality that is you.  

The real you - the awareness that is aware of these words - has the potential to change and grow in any moment.  

Anything that can be said about you - even if it was valid in the last moment - could be obsolete in the next.  

And yet most of us opt to live in the cardboard reality in which we are described by this or that concept (or collection of concepts) - by this or that objectification.  

The price we pay is that we give up the experience of ourselves as a living dynamic process.  We give up the richness of constantly finding out who we are, Now, in this moment.  We forgo the process of ever deepening intimacy with our own body, our own energy and our own deeper self:

A self which can NOT be reduced to any concept or constellation of concepts.

Like a shy deer in the forest, our deeper self is nowhere to be seen when the noisy obnoxious chronically objectifying mental mind is around.

Even, or perhaps especially, your own name is an identification.  What do you think of, what habitual feelings come up, when you bring your name to mind?  Whatever comes up is what is scaring the shy animal of your deeper self away. 

There is a better way.

As we develop in the inner capacity of de-objectification, the shy and beautiful animal of our deep inner self begins to show itself.  And - as we deepen in this capacity - slowly our relationship with this beautiful being inside us develops...

...Until one day, 

quite suddenly,

our vantage point shifts 

and we realize that who we've been identifying with is something less than what we actually are.  

We have had it wrong all along.  We are not who we thought we were.  Indeed, we are not something that can ever be thought at all.  Thinking is getting in the way of our ability to experience our self.

At this point we realize that we are that shy animal - that beautiful being inside ourselves that has been buried in other people's ideas that we have taken on and mistaken for our own.

And now, only now, does the real journey begin.