Step 4 – Knowing my world
You have now set up your practice, begun defining your happiness and learned to observe and know yourself in moments of situations, dimension by dimension.
It is now time for you to learn how to observe and know the world you live in.
We all live somewhere. Wherever this may be and however we live, there is always a world around us. Moreover, we are always in a relationship with people, institutions, ideas and things. The relationships may be close or distant; they may be few or numerous; they may be long lasting or transient, but they always exist. Thus, although many of your experiences of happiness are derived from within you, they always occur in the context of where you are, of your world. They take place in the context of your relationships to people, institutions, ideas and things in that world. There are many perspectives from which you can observe and know the world. For this method, we will call these perspectives “aspects” to differentiate them from the elements of your happiness and from the dimensions of yourself. Likewise, in any situation, these aspects could be conducive or non-conducive to happiness. Thus, observing and knowing your world through the lens of these aspects can be very useful.
Knowing your world will require keen observation and reflection. You probably already have an ability to observe, reflect and formulate ideas on the world in which you live. The method and the five aspects it uses may help you to further develop this ability. As with knowing ourselves, a key challenge we all face in knowing our world is the tendency to be reductionist and to consider only a few aspects of our world in a static manner. For instance, we may observe the world mainly through some relationships and not through multiple other aspects and roles. For example, we may understand primarily our family lives or our work lives but not the social or political aspects far or close to us. We may not consider the structures and rules around us thoughtfully enough. In general, this tendency results in the fact that at any given moment in time, we have only partial information. To counter this narrowness, the method offers a tool with 5 aspects that help to observe, reflect on and know the world you live in in a more complete, interrelated and dynamic manner.
As with knowing yourself through the 7 dimensions, you will use the tool with its 5 aspects for knowing your world, situation by situation. You will learn to closely know the world of a past, present or future situation in your life. It is that knowledge of specific situations that will give you an increasingly deep and wide-ranging knowledge of your world and of the relationships you have within it. Also, through this evolving knowledge of your world with the tool offered, you will be increasingly able to evidence aspects of it that may be conducive or non-conducive to happiness.
You have now set up your practice, begun defining your happiness and learned to observe and know yourself in moments of situations, dimension by dimension.
Thus, the mnemonic for Step 4 is WORLD, which stands for W5 (What, Where, Why, Who, When), Organization, Relationship, Law and Duty.
These are the five aspects for observation, reflection and knowledge of your world. Although your experiences are very much generated from within yourself at any time and at any place, especially when you are in the intrinsic mode, they always occur within the relational world in which you live. The tool WORLD will help you to know this world. It is also designed to be complementary to the tools PEACE and MINDSET that you have learned to use. Furthermore, the three tools will be combined in a single template, as was done for PEACE and MINDSET in step 3, to offer an increasingly coordinated and complete knowledge of your definition of happiness, of yourself and of your world.
This combined three-tool template will be used in steps 5 and 6. This is template 4a for knowing your world:
4a. World Template
Download the 4a WORLD template (.pdf, 78 Kb):
Download
Download
Template Instructions
To begin, start with a simple situation to which you will give a name, and write that name at the top of the template after “Name of Situation.” You may choose any situation from the recent past or an ongoing situation that is fresh in your memory. You will now observe it and reflect on it from the 5 aspects, one by one, starting with “W5” and then proceeding with “Organization,” “Law,” “Relationships” and finally “Duties.”
Watch a general overview of how to use template 4a. WORLD.
Transcript (.pdf, 122 Kb)3m 13s
The following pages in this step describe each of the WORLD elements in more detail. You will also be able to download the WORLD template and watch a video or read instructions on how to fill out each element. Let’s begin with W5.