“Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject” [John Keats]
I could ask myself to think about the way I am breathing currently. It is often joked that this makes you start to think too much about your breathing, making you switch from automatic breathing to manual breathing. I have been reading “The Art of Game Design” by Jesse Schell, and in one of the earlier chapters, he talks about the paradox of actually observing your experiences. If we want to learn our thoughts about a certain experience, it would be best to observe our own thoughts while we are still experiencing it, as it is much harder to bring back those feelings after the fact. The quantum-mechanics-like problem we face here is that the act of observing our experience disturbs it.
When watching a film, we could think about what we feel during the movie, but it would take us away from the experience, leaving us not able to actually grasp our emotions all that well. Schell argues, however, that we are able to train our zen in how we observe ourselves during the fact. At first by taking only slight glances at ourselves, but eventually by living both through the experience and the observation. This, then, is an exercise in meditation and mindfulness!
Logic is simple, as it is uncorruptible by observation. Feeling and personal experience are complex, as they change when observed. This may be one of the things that keeps people like me, who don’t have “the feeling” for social encounters, from developing their social skills as quickly as their logical skills. If I learn to observe these situations as a bystander, living both the experience while also being mindful of how these experiences make me feel, I can learn even more about myself and others. Very interesting indeed.
The problem is, this lies juxtaposed to my beliefs in flow and the Way. In doing nothing, nothing is left undone, and I should be able to do things without having to think about them. One big question is whether we are able to both observe and do nothing at the same time. Is it like putting the self outside of the self? Or should observation be yet another non-action, something which will eventually be felt instead of done? These are all questions I will have to meditate on further. For the actual act of silent observation, I may want to practise it first by observing my breathing without manually breathing, to then build this up towards other daily tasks that I engage in.