We unquestioningly fill our lives and the lives of others with these sorts of interpretations and diagnoses, and by choosing them, we add to the materiality of our identity and ego and detract from the non-material becoming self from ourselves. An awareness of how these choices and processes work offers us an opportunity to make new choices based on our critical reflection on the meaning perspectives that motivate such interpretations and diagnoses.
As with the child and the toy, we strive to make form out of the world around us. When we are very young, a great deal of that form comes from those around us. We learn from the company we keep. These learned perceptions inform our lives at the beginning, and their sense of form becomes our sense of form. In that way, our youthful contexts and influences inform the nature of many of our major syllogistic premises. These unquestioned premises become the first step in making our meaning perspectives feel like valid logic, like inherent truths of being. In their unquestioned way, meaning perspectives operate on the ontological level; they define the nature of being, existence in the world. We originally accepted this ontological point of view without even knowing what that can mean, and our way of seeing, our way of learning about the world, our epistemological experience becomes limited to the meaning perspectives of the past. We see the present and future in terms of and limited by the past.
This construction of meaning perspectives can happen all of our lives. When we lack awareness or attention to these formations of past driven meaning perspectives, we will see through them and remain unaware of how they define the nature of our experience of the world. The becoming self seeks as clear a vision of the world as possible so it can respond to the world and learn from the world as we discussed in our working definition of the becoming self:
The self exists as a conscious, independent entity which perceives the world, takes information from that perception, learns from that information, makes choices based on that learning, and acts freely on those choices. The self experiences the results of those choices, accepts the responsibility of those choices and results, and the process begins again.
"I saw what I saw" and "I heard what I heard" are phrases that we often use to speak about our perceived experience. On its linguistic surface, it forms a kind of tautology, a circular statement that doesn't serve to clarify or add to the truth value of that statement. However, it does tell us something about our beliefs in our experience. We do see what we see, but that we believe in its absolute truth makes for a weakness in our refection on our perception. No one sees with absolute objectivity. In the book Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein invents the idea of "Fair Witness," a person trained to observe and speak with absolute objectivity, no interpretations or diagnoses. When asked "what color is that barn," the Fair Witness answers, "The side I see is white." Training forbids the assumption that unseen sides share the same color. Even in this extreme case of a highly trained person, all the other factors that can make for a subjective viewing aren't considered. The time of day and weather conditions can influence how this person sees. Changes in the vision of that person can influence even something as simple as the perceived color. Even the way in which the definition of "white" may vary can lead a highly trained "Fair Witness" into some level of subjectivity. Granting we cannot see absolutely objectively, we become aware of our subjectivity. When we take on and employ that awareness, we will better see the world for what it actually offers rather than the one we see through the screens of meaning perspectives unquestioningly formed by past experience and learning.