The Power of Observation.
The world is dynamic. It is changing every moment. The change is so slow that most of us fail to notice.
Observation is watching the change to happen without being changed by it. Experience is living through the changes. Observer watches from the riverbank. Swimmer experiences in the river getting wet.
Do you know what Stephen Hawking did his whole life. Something for which he will always be cherished and it is not teaching. He used to observe stars. All his great theories are based on observation and deduction therefrom.
Life experience is often the two things together. Observation acts as catalyst and changes the experience. Sometimes Observation changes the perception aka knowledge.
This seems like contradiction. But it is not. It is Maya.
Maya
A monk once demonstrated this with a large spatula-like spoon. He held it in his left hand and let it rotate, catching it with his right hand after it had turned ninety degrees.
The spoon traveled every single degree between the two hands. Nothing skipped, nothing jumped. Yet no one watching could see it move at any given moment. The eye only registered the start and the catch. The turning itself stayed invisible. This, he said, is Maya.
That is the world too. It moves through every degree, every moment, without pause. But the mind, unable to track continuous change, fills the gap with imagination.
The Nature of Imagination
Imagination is a human tool to predict and build the future. Imagination sees a beginning and an end and assumes nothing happened in between. Often, this tool is abused in daydreaming. But that is not why humans possess it.
Humans appear to be largely unconscious operators. We are aware enough to suffer, but not aware enough to see clearly. To make an observation.
Observation and Creation
What makes human intelligence different from artificial intelligence is observation. Human beings have a tremendous ability to observe and understand.
As stated earlier, Imagination is used to fill the gaps in observation. Observation and imagination work together to produce creation.
The wheel, the steam engine, and the silicon chip are all examples of this combination. Imagination without observation is mere fantasy. Together, they are the only tools that create something genuinely new.
A child watches water flow. He imagines it directed. A canal is born. Nobody taught him to imagine. Observation triggered it. This combination is not reserved for inventors. Every person uses it.
A mother reads her child’s face and knows what they need. No words were exchanged. Observation filled what speech could not.
Stillness versus Noise and Information
This tool is available to everyone. But the tragedy is that few use it deliberately. Most let it drift into daydreaming or worry. Both are imagination running without observation as its anchor.
Observation requires stillness. Modern life provides none. We have replaced stillness with information. Information is not observation. It is noise mistaken for signal.
Modern education has ruined the ability to observe. It turns graduates into little search engines. They retrieve crammed data but cannot solve real problems. This habit is a barrier to direct contact with the present moment.
Automatons and Waking Sleep
George Gurdjieff stated that people cannot perceive reality in their current state. They live in a state of hypnotic waking sleep. As a result, humans function as unconscious automatons. Wars and violence could not take place if people were awake. We are surrounded by automatons.
Look at our daily routines. People walk the exact same path every morning. They sit on the exact same bench every day, week after week. They are lost in thought, completely oblivious to steps around them.
Even simple actions, like hanging clothes, are done on auto-pilot. If the clothes hanger opening always faces the right, it is repeated without questioning.
Direct observation is the only way to break this hypnotic waking sleep. Observation acts like a Ctrl+C command to the mind’s automatic loops.
Try Observation without analysis, some time. There are so many articles written here about events, people, movies and, so on. When I saw or observed, there was no plan to write about it. Writing happened later. Observation was undiluted and it worked. An observation with a running commentary inside the mind, is useless noise.
In the next Chapter we shall discuss privacy, social life and voice mail.
References:
All Articles on What is Life? The Processing of Memory by Human Mind