Personal Universe
Attend to your unfolding as a whole being by challenging your experience and knowledge.
the big movements—Collective Actualization, Design Revolution, and Global Regeneration—will only move us toward the Great Turning if we’re able to transform the world in ways that actually make it better. Such transformations start in our minds, and this pattern talks about how we can prepare our minds for the task.
We’re all born with an innate potential as world creators, but we’re not naturally good at it. We need to grow as individuals, but we could easily spend several lifetimes reaching for perfection and never do anything else.
The concept of a personal universe is useful in that it gives a name to something you may not have known you possessed. That something is your sense of yourself as a whole being: your wholeness. To strengthen your personal universe is to move you toward a sense of greater wholeness.
To be clear, there is nothing wrong with who you are right now. Nothing. In trying to strengthen your personal universe, a process we’ll talk about later, we’re not trying to “fix” you. There’s nothing broken. We’re also not trying to create something new: you already have an amazing personal universe (though you may not call it that), and it is already working beautifully to help you navigate your life on this planet.
The goal of strengthening your Personal Universe is to help you see Universe as it really is. It’s very easy for us to fool ourselves and construct a model of Universe that has little to do with reality.
How you got a personal universe
Our personal universe is created through experience and our interpretation of experience. Much of our experience is being taught about the experiences of others, through school, family stories or even TV and social media. We also learn a lot through conditioning, by watching others around us. Any experience, whether direct or indirect can lead to an inaccurate understanding our the world: we might misinterpret the meaning of our experience; we might overgeneralize; the second-hand information we receive might be inaccurate, misinterpreted, overgeneralized or intentionally misleading.
We seem to have parts of our mind that strive to keep our internal model of universe consistent. If we encounter information that goes against what we think we know, we experience “cognitive dissonance” and work to resolve it. We do not seem to be as good at keeping our model of universe consistent with our external reality. More often than not, our brains filter out contradicting information before we are even conscious of it. We have to consciously work to maintain a right relationship with reality.
Strengthening your personal universe
All of this is about optimizing you for a particular task: making the world better. The world is complex, and for the most part, our educational systems and social structures are not designed to develop humans into powerfully aware, deeply caring, comprehensively intelligent world creators. That is something that you have to do yourself. You have to take on the challenge of making yourself a sovereign human being.
Daniel Schmachtenberger defined sovereignty, I think convincingly, as “as the product of sentience, intelligence, and agency.” So those are the general lines of development that we want to pursue.
I find it useful to think about it as a process of strengthening your personal universe. Personal universe is a metaphor for who you are: your experience, your knowledge, and the psycho-technologies you use to improve your experience and knowledge and apply it to creating a better world.
A challenge to your personal universe should transform it in some way, presumably toward a greater wholeness. Sometimes that will be a small correction in your knowledge, but other times, it can result in what are called paradigm shifts. Before any of these kinds of transformations can happen, you need to be open to change—Uncertain Knowing.
Humanity’s universe
We all have our own personal universes, and when we combine our universes by collaborating with others or participating in collective sensemaking, we become even more capable as a group. All of our personal universes combined would make up Humanity’s universe. Imagine for a moment what it would be like if somehow, you suddenly had access to all the capabilities of Humanity’s universe: all the experience and knowledge that anyone has ever had. There isn’t anything you couldn’t do. We can’t achieve that as individuals (not yet, anyway), but collectively, if we work together, we can accomplish anything.
Therefore:
Attend to your unfolding as a whole being by challenging your personal universe and making it stronger: more in-line with reality.
Challenge your personal universe—Your Own Thinking, Rethinking, Knowledge Rating—but whenever possible, challenges should be done in Small Steps. A strong personal universe is not easily created in isolation, but the process can be sped up by working with others to solve problems—Creative Practice