TWO: How Not to See a Person

“If you want to understand humanity, you have to focus on the thoughts and emotions of individuals, not just data about groups.

THREE: Illumination

“That gaze, that first sight, represents a posture toward the world. A person who is looking for beauty is likely to find wonders, while a person looking for threats will find danger. A person who beams warmth brings out the glowing sides of the people she meets, while a person who conveys formality can meet the same people and find them stiff and detached. “Attention,” the psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist writes, “is a moral act: it creates, brings

aspects of things into being.

FIVE: What is a Person?

“And this traumatic vignette highlights a central truth about what human beings are: A person is a point of view. Every person you meet is a creative artist who takes the events of life and, over time, creates a very personal way of seeing the world. Like any artist, each person takes the experiences of a lifetime and integrates them into a complex representation of the world. That representation, the subjective consciousness that makes you you, integrates your memories, attitudes, beliefs, convictions, traumas, loves, fears,

desires, and goals into your own distinct way of seeing.” (Brooks, “How to Know a Person”,

p.64)

“People don’t see the world with their eyes; they see it with their entire life.

I will not reduce you to a type or restrict you to a label, like many of those human-typology systems do—Myers-Briggs, the Enneagram, the zodiac, and so on. Instead, I want to receive you as an active creator. I want to understand how you construct your point of view. I want to ask you how you see things. I want you to teach me about the enduring energies of old events that shape how you see the world today. I’m going to engage with you. Looking at a person is different from looking at a thing because a person is looking back at you. I’m going to get to know you at the same time you’re going to get to know me. Quality conversation is the essence of this approach. If we’re going to become Illuminators, we need to first ask questions and engage with answers. We need to ask:

How does this look to you? Do you see the same situation I see?

PART TWO: Private Victory

Habit 1: Be Proactive - Principles of Personal Vision

“In fact, until we take how we see ourselves (and how we see others) into account, we will be unable to understand how others see and feel about themselves and their world. Unaware, we will project our intentions on their behavior and call ourselves objective. This significantly limits our personal potential and our ability to relate to others as well. But because of the unique human capacity of self-awareness, we can examine our paradigms to determine whether they are reality- or principle-based or if they are a function of conditioning and conditions.