Here we are, talking about lifestyle design and personal development. Why? Well, technology is evolving the same way human race is. The stuff we’re talking about today is really, really huge.
How do we perceive the depth in things?
We can find answers in this brief post written by Mike Schumacher, and I want to share it with everyone who’s interested in personal development, self improvement and growth. If you’re interested in Mike’s opinions, thoughts and articles, you can read his writings at http://mikeschu.info/
Boundaries in Personal Development
When a boundary or a line is drawn, there are two sides generated. A drawn line indicates a difference in perspective, while boundaries imply an inclusive and an exclusive perspective relative to what side of the boundary you are on.
Boundaries are imposed on us from a variety of sources. Our parents are the first to draw boundaries. Friends and social groups draw boundaries. The use of social groups includes religious affiliations and places of employment. Governments also draw boundaries on what people can and can’t do through the application of laws. We can even draw our own boundaries as we attach meaning to events. Boundaries and lines can be physical or mental constructs.
Consider your elementary school teacher or parent imploring you to “stay within the lines!” when you were coloring with crayons as a child. Your parents and teachers assume that the lines are boundaries when in actuality they are not. You can certainly color outside of the lines on the page. You can even color outside of the page, as parents that have experience with kids, walls and crayons know. The perception of meaning attached to the lines (e.g. bad grades, scolding by parents, good grades, your art posted on the classroom wall) is what specifies the lines on a coloring page as boundaries.
As I said previously, it is healthy to set boundaries at times. Your parents didn’t want you to experience electrocution as an infant, so they likely placed protective plastic plugs in the unused electrical sockets around the house. The protective plug acts as a boundary between you and electrical current. If you’re trying to break an addiction to alcohol, you may need to set up a mental boundary of not going into bars, liquor stores, and the liquor sections of supermarkets. There are good safety reasons why it is important for football players to not hit or tackle someone out-of-bounds in a football game – they may be unprotected (like coaches), innocent bystanders (the fans and media), or the tackle may cause injury when someone makes contact with a wall, steel pole, bench, or another person.
Yet at some point in your personal development, some boundaries may no longer serve you. Most of us eventually understand that electrocution is a bad thing, so once that lesson is learned the plastic plugs can come out of the wall sockets. It’s silly to keep using the protection plugs when everyone knows not to stick improper items in electrical sockets. Similarly, your parents may have told you to avoid certain people or certain neighborhoods when you were growing up, but people and communities change over time.
The trick of expanding perspective for most people is to know that all boundaries are false – they’re actually just lines with meaning attached to them. For instance, many people cross the line between being an employee and an entrepreneur. However, it’s relatively common for people to identify with one side of the entrepreneur/employee preference and express negative opinions of the other. There is no “other side” when it is apparent that both perspectives answer the question, “How do you make money?” Similarly, you can drive a car off of a cliff. The cliff edge is a line between earth and air that should be respected, but it’s not a boundary. This last example states a good point: just because all boundaries are false does not mean that all lines and perspectives are false. Maintaining respect for lines and differing perspectives is very important, as I’ll discuss in a future post.
It becomes apparent that personal growth to expand perspective happens in one of two ways.
1. Dissolve the boundaries by removing the meaning attached to the line. The civil rights movement and the abolition of apartheid are good examples of dissolving perceived racial boundaries.
2. Expand the boundaries to be more inclusive of perspectives, people, etc….
By extrapolation, recognizing and experiencing that there are in fact no boundaries in the Universe is considered enlightenment by most of the world’s religions.
From my perspective, I cannot speak of personal growth in terms of enlightenment. As I’ve said before, you can’t count on instantaneous enlightenment happening during a lifetime. You might catch glimpses of it and have peak experiences that closely replicate it, but sustained enlightenment is something that very few people attain (or remember, depending on your point of view).
One of the goals of the blog to pursue and write about mechanisms of personal growth. By incremental expansion and dissolution of boundaries, we can change how we view the world. It’s unlikely we’ll be able to achieve complete enlightenment during our lifetime, but we can influence the world positively by adopting more perspectives in our decision making and worldview.
For this week, consider the physical and mental boundaries you experience. Consider how they may be turned back into lines that are to be respected (or not) and what perspective you need to take to make it part of your reality. I’d like to hear about your experiences in the comments.