Newsletter #2: Perspectives — Instant Reality Upgrade

This week’s topic is Perspectives. After a thread of mine that gained a lot of attention and sparked profound debates, I decided to elaborate on this topic to explore how this can lead to an instant consciousness upgrade.

My original thread:

• There are 8 billion people, all having a multitude of different perspectives than yours.

• The probability is high that you have a very limited perspective on reality.

• You may suffer from trying to defend it as the only truth. You will feel a huge relief by just letting go of any single perspective.

• Instead, accept all of them as part of reality, taking on whichever is useful moment to moment.

Blind men and an elephant

There is a fun parable illustrating this notion that is often told in Buddhist teachings: “Blind men and an elephant.”¹ It involves a group of blind men asked to describe the elephant in the room. Depending on which part of the elephant they touched, they came up with different concepts, e.g., it’s like a snake, or a fan, or a tree. There was some partial truth in all these notions, though none matched the whole elephant.

This ties directly into the notion of Perspectivism², already posed by Friedrich Nietzsche. It says that every person perceives reality through their own unique, but limited lens. Thus, the conclusion is that no absolute can exist as everything is relative to a given context, such as the conditioning of an individual person.

This is a great and true observation, but it doesn’t come without problems. One of them is that it may result in extreme Relativism, ending in Nihilism. If nothing is true in an absolute sense because everything is relative—then nothing is actually true at all nor has any real meaning. We get stuck here.

This is one of the core struggles with much of postmodernist thinking, as to my current understanding.

Shift in Perspective

But there is a small, nonetheless important notion which often tends to be overlooked in this stance of relativism. We concluded that every perspective is relative to a given context. We further agree that this notion seems to be true. In that regard, it seems to be truer than any single perspective. One can say it is a meta-perspective.

It seems trivial, but actually, it is a quite profound step. Visually speaking, we just shifted our perspective from a two-dimensional plane to a three-dimensional bird’s-eye view. We don’t have to know every single individual perspective within the plane to shift up and see that all these perspectives exist and within the two-dimensional plane are relative to one another.

To give a more practical illustration of this: Many ideologies, like most religions and materialism, claim that their truth is absolute in some sense.

We may come to see that their views are true within the relative lens of perception or belief of the person holding these views. That may include the notion of a creator God as a metaphysical entity or an objective physical reality started with the big bang.

If one believes in a various conception of god or an objective material reality, it is true relative to their conditioning and experience.

We can shift up our perspective to recognize that all these views are partially true. We come to a new, greater truth that includes all these partial truths, without having to subscribe to any single one of them. It is not just another perspective, but a perpendicular shift into a meta perspective.

Enter a new dimensions

This can come with a feeling of relief, as we don’t need to fight over or prove any single view. We can accept them all as part of a greater reality. We transcend the problem of Relativism, as we can rank perspectives from less to more inclusive—where each shift in perspective includes all other previous perspectives.

We also don’t end up in Nihilism, as we can find profound meaning and peace within our new, greater perspective—as the negative psychological consequences often associated with Nihilism come from a finite perspective.

We literally shifted our consciousness into another dimension. This is not another realm, but just another level of depth to view reality through. Within a two-dimensional plane, many things were overshadowed, disconnected. From the bird’s-eye perspective, we can see how they’re in fact connected. Note that we can directly experience how reality and therefore consciousness is infinite: there is always another shift within consciousness to occur. It’s just our own limiting beliefs that hold us back and keep us in a lower dimensional plane. We’ve barely scratched the surface of multi-dimensional reality.

Some remarkable thinkers have made similar notions, linking this shift to stages in psychological development (Robert Kegan)³ as well as parallels in historical eras and developments of societies: archaic, magic, mythic, rational, postmodern, integral (Gebser⁴, Ken Wilber⁵) and development in consciousness: unperspectival, perspectival, aperspectival (Gebser)⁴.

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