“Practice your anthropological approach. Pretend you’re a scientist observing a culture of one — yourself. The trick is not to judge what you see, but to neutrally observe how you function, including your thought processes. Awareness and kindness are key.”
— Ariel and Shya Kane, How to Have A Match Made in Heaven: A Transformational Approach to Dating, Relating, and Marriage
Just like with role-playing games, I didn’t pay much attention to anthropology for a long time. I had heard of it, but I thought — erroneously, as I discovered later — of it mainly being a science studying ancient cultures. So, I dismissed it as not being relevant to me.
But then I discovered the work of Ariel and Shya Kane and their anthropological approach to living in the moment.
I was honored to meet these remarkable and award-winning authors in person at their seminars and tap into many of their written, video, and audio resources. They are my favorite writers on living in the moment because their work has an immense empowering effect on many who get acquainted with it, me included.
Their brilliant idea, reflected in the quote at the beginning of this chapter — is to study ourselves non-judgmentally, as anthropologists do when they study a culture they are interested in. And they recommend doing it as if each of us was a culture of one person, which each of us, taken individually, is.
This idea is utterly ingenious, enlightening, and eye-opening. First, through Ariel and Shya Kane’s approach and learning that it was anthropological, my curiosity toward anthropology ignited.
I bought a book, “For Dummies,” on anthropology and learned about a cornerstone approach of modern cultural anthropology called “cultural relativism.”
Here are two eye-opening quotes on this approach and how it came to be:
“[O]ne foundation of anthropology is the comparative approach, in which cultures aren’t compared to one another in terms of which is better than the other but rather in an attempt to understand how and why they differ as well as share commonalities. This method is also known as cultural relativism, an approach that rejects making moral judgments about different kinds of humanity and simply examines each relative to its own unique origins and history.” — Cameron M. Smith, Anthropology For Dummies
And
“Many of the changes in the early 20th century came from a recognition that cultural anthropologists should attempt to understand other human cultures rather than judge them. This approach, called cultural relativism, promotes the idea that each culture should be understood in its own terms, rather than judged by outsiders. Cultural relativism is one of the cornerstones of cultural anthropology.” — ibid.
When you apply cultural relativism to yourself, it is essential that you stop comparing yourself to others and judging what you do better or worse than others. Instead, you can observe the differences in thought processes and behavior, but you don’t label them as good or bad. You simply use what you learn in the world surrounding you to explore the world inside you and how your culture of one person develops while you interact with the cultures of others.
So, that was an introduction to what we could term the theory of Self-Anthropology.
I am not sure this term exists (at least a short search online didn’t give a definite result), but I find myself often putting self- in front of other helpful and empowering words and seeing how these turn into tools for self-compassion and self-support.
However, Self-Anthropology is not only a new term. It is also a game, and more precisely, a role-playing game. A deliberate role-playing game — one of the three you play intentionally in reality while turning your life into fun games for yourself.
And yes, you play the role of an anthropologist in this game.
Before we go any further, I suggest you reread the quote at the beginning of this chapter. It offers a perfect summary of the game, revealing the intricacies of the role-play, which I will address in detail below. For your convenience, here is the quote again:
“Practice your anthropological approach. Pretend you’re a scientist observing a culture of one — yourself. The trick is not to judge what you see, but to neutrally observe how you function, including your thought processes. Awareness and kindness are key.”
— Ariel and Shya Kane, How to Have A Match Made in Heaven: A Transformational Approach to Dating, Relating, and Marriage
So, you play the role of an anthropologist, who studies oneself as the culture of one person.
Your goal in the Self-Anthropology game is the non-judgmental observation of yourself, your thoughts, feelings, and emotions, and how you interact with the world around you.
You could say that any aha moment is the reward you gain while playing this game. So you could see this game as a collection of many tiny games (remembering that any game, both real-life and as we know them, is fractal) where each observation is a goal reached.
In this game, you are like a treasure hunter on a special self-study trail, where each discovery, recognition, and epiphany is a gemstone.
The rules for this game are both complex and simple.
Simple because all you have to do in this game is to be just where you are and how you are right now, without changing anything about yourself or your life, and simply observe the worlds inside and around you. Observe how your thoughts rush toward your dreams and goals and simultaneously push you away from taking a step toward those goals and how you feel hopeful, ambitious, excited, and also scared, fretful, and upset.
The complexity of this game comes from all the dynamics of your thought processes, feelings, and emotions and that you take them too seriously and too personally.
“Of course I do!” you might exclaim. “They are my thoughts, after all.”
They are, but they don’t have to define you. Here is what Ariel and Shya Kane say in this respect:
“Most people think that they are their thoughts. They believe that the voice they listen to, the voice that speaks to them about how they are doing, about how life is showing up, what they want or don’t want, is really them. They don’t think that they are listening to some disembodied commentary, one that is sometimes accurate and sometimes not.”
— Ariel and Shya Kane, Practical Enlightenment
And also,
“You are not your voice. You have a voice. And when you can make the distinction between the one who listens and the voice, you get control over the mechanical nature of life.” — ibid.
While turning my life into fun games and playing more and more the three, as I started calling them, intentional or deliberate, actual real-life role-playing games, I discovered that all those thought processes, feelings, and emotions are information provided to me by the fantastic two-player teams of my conscious and subconscious, the left and right hemispheres of my brain, my mind and heart, my head and body, my logic and intuition, the ambitious and laid-back parts of me, and probably many others.
And any information these special teams provide can be an awareness booster.
Here is the best definition of awareness I have ever happened to come across:
“A nonjudgmental, non-preferential seeing. It’s an objective, noncritical witnessing of the nature or what we call the ‘isness’ of any particular circumstance or situation. It can be described as an ongoing process in which you are bringing yourself back to the moment, rather than complaining silently about how you would prefer this moment to be.”
— Ariel and Shya Kane, Practical Enlightenment
Yes, information can sharpen your awareness in specific areas of your life and remain irrelevant or even distracting or unproductive in others. So, your task as a self-anthropologist is to identify the real-life game to which the information given by your emotions, feelings, and thoughts applies. The aha moments are your rewards in each round of the Self-Anthropology game.
Here is an example: a story that happened to me and was highly revealing about how the subconscious and conscious parts of me, or, in other words, my subconscious and conscious awareness, work together.
A Phone Call: A True Short Story
As a self-employed person working from home, I try to go for a walk when I don’t have to go to the city on an errand or to other places for a business trip. I often have this walk right after bringing my children to school and before starting the workday at home.
The walk usually lasts a little more than twenty minutes along a couple of beautiful bicycle and pedestrian paths through a park area with clearings and benches surrounded by small forest-like areas and often referred to as forest, and finishes with the path through a residential area before I cross the street leading to my children’s school and enter the part of the street we live in.
Occasionally, I call my mother during these walks. She lives only one and a half kilometers away from where my husband, our two children, and I live, and we meet regularly, but she enjoys these occasional calls during my walks. She also recognizes when I am outside for a walk and asks me to confirm. These talks often result in us conversing on many different topics from the past, present, and plans for the future.
On one such walk, as I took the phone out of my jacket pocket, I noticed the wind hurrying me along the path. I usually love this frisky company on my walks as long as it is not too strong and scary, bending trees, breaking branches, or shifting larger objects along the ground. But however refreshing and pleasant the wind might be, it is not very helpful when you call someone, making the conversation partners strain on both ends trying to hear and understand each other, especially for those who wear a hearing aid as my mother does.
“I will wait until I turn the corner and be able to call Mama in the quiet,” I told myself. I was happy with this idea and let my eyes roam the surroundings and my thoughts flow. I enjoyed the cool breeze on my face, the varying shades of green of different parts of trees on my path, and the blue of the sky with many clouds of various shades of white galloping across it.
My thoughts were as merry as the colors around me while the wind played with my hair and the loose ends of my jacket. I thought of what I was up to that day, looking forward to making progress in my daily games, as I call the projects and activities I take on in my current life.
I turned the corner and continued the happy contemplations of the day ahead while enjoying the gentle sun on my face and the still air around me.
At some point, my thoughts took on a darker shadow. The smile on my face disappeared, and I found myself frowning.
I recalled how many years before, my mother had told me about a disturbing phone call. A family member of one of my former colleagues in Moldova called her while I was in Germany and working on my Ph.D. thesis. This person told my mother some untrue and upsetting things about me. And even if my mother knew they weren’t true and the person didn’t claim them to be true but only speculated they might be, the things the person said upset my mother deeply.
The anger and sadness I had felt years before when I heard about this phone call for the first time surfaced again. Not with the same intensity as then, but the upset was there.
The experience of playing the self-anthropologist’s game for over ten years — even if I only recently started referring to this practice as a game — helped me look through the upset and recognize that I had been in a blissful mood only moments before. So, I asked myself, why had I suddenly started thinking about that phone call to my mother after so many years, and having forgiven the caller for almost as many years?
And suddenly, it dawned on me. The key phrases sounded clearly in my head and shone brightly as light bulbs. “Call to my Mom,” “turned the corner,” “no wind anymore.”
I recalled that I’d wanted to call my mother upon turning the corner, where I expected the path to be wind-free, which it was.
And as I recalled that, I realized that my subconscious dug out that unpleasant experience from my past to wake me up from my daydreaming and remind me of my conscious wish to call my mother during a wind-free patch of my morning walk on that day.
It was the first time I became so utterly aware that my subconscious is not only my friend but also an excellent — and probably the best I could ever have — personal assistant.
After this experience, I started noticing more and more how supportive my subconscious, or intuition, is of my conscious wishes and intentions.
Such epiphanies also make me more passionate about Self-Anthropology, a kind and gameful study of ourselves and the worlds inside and around us as we interact with them.
The skill-set of a self-anthropologist will boost the skill sets you will attain in the next two levels, or actual real-life role-playing games, of the fascinating role-playing game collection called life.
About this article:
It is an excerpt from Actual Real-Life Role-Playing Games: A Gamefully Philosophical View on Life and How to Design and Play It.
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