Something I’ve been doing lately, especially when bored, is changing perspectives. Wherever I am, whether it’s a social situation, in meditation, in the woods, wherever, I try to switch my perspective from my own to someone or something else’s. I’ve gained a lot as a result: increased empathy, enhanced creativity, and perhaps most importantly, curbed boredom.
Although we can never fully change our perspectives, we can extricate ourselves from them enough to get an idea of what someone or something else’s experience of the word is. It can be enlightening.
Next time you’re bored, pick out a person and try to imagine exactly what it’s like to be him. It doesn’t matter whether or not you know him. Start with his physical perceptions. Is he fat? Skinny? With glasses? Really focus on moving your awareness into his mind and perceiving the environment as he’s perceiving it in that moment. Imagine what it physically feels like for him to be doing whatever he’s doing as you watch him go about his business. If you’re a girl, imagine what it feels like to have male genitalia between your legs, no breasts, and a big beer belly. If you’re a guy, imagine what it actually feels like to have breasts and female genitalia. Imagine what it would be like to be a completely irrational, emotional being with no grasp of logic or practicality, which is all women.
(That’s a joke.)
The normal, resting, default physical sensations of men versus women are quite different. Same goes for other different body types. It feels very different to be physically fit or fat (I’ve been both). I wonder what it would feel like to be 6’6”, or 4’8”, or to have huge hands and feet, or to be very scrawny or a huge bodybuilder on steroids.
You can take it a step further and guess at some of your subject’s personality traits. Does he seem shy? Happy? Imagine how different his experience of the environment and his interactions is from yours.
I’ve found when I do this exercise, it increases my capacity for empathy. Even if someone initially offends my senses with body odor or excessive obesity or filthy hands or hair, for example, when I try to put myself into that person’s mind and try to imagine what his experience of the world is, I can’t hate him. I actually feel some level of love for him.
In the end, we’re all just doing the best we can with the limited knowledge we have. Same goes for every living creature.
You can do this exercise with friends or loved ones as well, which can be even more enlightening than when done with strangers because you know more about the stories and personalities of those close to you. You’re better able to put yourself into their shoes, better equipped to try to perceive their environments or life circumstances through their subjective lenses. Of course, even with those closest to you, you can never fully escape your lens and you can never fully understand theirs. After all, you’re imagining through your own lens in the first place. However, when you imagine the world through the eyes of your friends and family, you can learn a lot. How do you think they perceive you? This can be a difficult and emotional question to answer.
We tend to automatically assume that others see things the way we do, and when their behavior contradicts our belief system, we’re offended. By changing perspectives often as described above, we can slowly whittle away our natural assumptions. As a result, we increase our happiness. We will be more likely to understand and accept why a person acts in a certain way instead of trying to alter his behavior to fit our own belief system.
As you’ve undoubtedly heard before, trying to change anyone is pointless. Better to accept him for who he is and allow him into or shun him from your reality. We always have that choice, even with family.
We can take this exercise a step further and imagine what it’s like to be our pets, or wildlife, or even inanimate objects like toilet seats. What a terrible existence that would be!
You see though, I’m imagining being a toilet seat through my own subjective lens. If I were a toilet seat, it would be terrible because I know what happens on them, or rather, through them. However, maybe if a toilet seat were conscious (and I believe even inanimate objects are conscious in a way we humans are probably unable to understand, or at least express), it would welcome each human ass as a source of warmth, a source of excitement. I don’t know. The toilet seat exercise is probably not the most useful one.
I often put myself behind my dogs’ eyes. What does it feel like to have that coat of fur? What does it feel like to walk on four legs with a wagging tail? What is their visual experience? What do I look like to them, and as they watch me at my computer all day, what do they think of my activity? Of course they can’t understand concepts like writing or the internet (I think), so do they think I sit here and click away for fun? Or for no reason? Or does their relatively low level of intelligence prevent them from being able even to wonder in the first place?
To continue with the example, when one of my dogs (I won’t say which) finds a pile of horse shit and immediately rolls around in it joyfully, my immediate response is anger. Everything about horse shit disgusts me, and I’ll have to deal with the smell during the car ride home. But I try to imagine the situation through my furry little friend’s point of view: I’m trotting along on four legs in the woods, happy as all hell that I’m free to roam, different smells are coming at me from all directions (smells that transfer so much more information than I can even begin to understand as a human), and I smell something rich and aromatic. My immediate response to the smell is to find the source, for it must be a beautiful pile of shit to produce such aromas! Now I’ve found it and I enjoyed the smell so much, I want to keep smelling it so I get it all over my fur. It feels great, and now I can smell it for a long time.
When I think through my dogs’ eyes, it’s difficult to be angry with them. They’re just doing their best with the limited knowledge they have, same as the rest of us. They don’t intend to piss me off, and they don’t even realize they’re doing something wrong in the first place. They probably can’t even understand the concepts of right and wrong, which as far as I can tell are limited to the human experience.
Try to imagine what it’s like to be me, typing this post. I’m at my desk, it’s 7 am on 4-18-14 (now editing at 8:15 am 4-21-14), the sun is coming through my window, one of my dogs is resting on the floor, the other on my bed. The birds are chirping. Spring is finally here and things are starting to bud, which makes me happy. I’m trying my best to write something that will be useful to those who find it. I’m hoping people who share my perspective will find this, glean something of value from it, and follow along.
And now I’m imagining what it’s like to be you, reader. Since very different types of people will read this, and those who find it boring will not have even come close to reaching this sentence before clicking away, I will imagine you’re interested in spiritual and/or self-development topics. You see how the exercise of switching perspectives could be not only a good way to pass the time while you’re waiting somewhere (which is my least favorite activity), but also a valuable practice. You wonder who I am, what I’m like, and how any human could be as sexy and all around incredible as I. You wish you could be my friend and you imagine the two of us walking down the beach as the surf cools our feet, discussing the nature of reality, laughing, crying, skipping and doing giggly cartwheels while wearing skimpy little speedos/bikinis.
Maybe that’s wishful thinking, but on a serious note, if that was your actual thought process while reading this, please click the back button and leave me alone.