Welcome to Observance Imaginate
Welcome to Observance Imaginate.
It’s really great to see you here. Let me tell you a bit about it and what to expect from this blog.
First, it’s about observation. More accurately it’s about the daily practice of Observance.
Secondly it’s about imagination. But first we’ll look at Observance.
What is Observance?
Observance – The Daily Practice
Observance is a daily practice similar to mindfulness. It is the process by which you come up with observations. It is a skill. It requires focus. It requires energy. It is the way of connecting present realities to past experience. It is the way of creating open connections to future experiences. It uses all 5 senses. It can be practiced with just our physical senses or aided with technology. It has 3 stages; ‘Splash’, ‘Immersion’ and ‘Soak’. (I’ll explain more about these in a later post.) Observance happens over time depending depending on the object being observed. Observance helps us to create virtual networks between objects, events, patterns, people, structures, methods, emotions, beliefs, basically all aspects of life.
How is Observance different to Mindfulness?
Observance is the next step after Mindfulness
Mindfulness requires focused awareness of our surroundings using our 5 senses without making judgements or drawing conclusions about those sensations.
Observance requires focused awareness of our surroundings using our 5 senses while making judgements, building connections, and drawing conclusions using past experience and previous knowledge.
It’s the next step after Mindfulness. It requires the ability to be mindful while combining it with the ability to connect one thing with abstract knowledge and experience from your past and also creating new open connections ready for another future observation. It’s how we make sense of the world.
Why do we need to work on our Observance skills ?
Mental and physical health, intellectual and physical skill sharpness.
First lets look at the health perspective. The world we now live in promotes leisure, ease, shortcuts and more than anything else self absorption. (This is entirely different to self awareness as I’ll explain in later posts.) Living a life of leisure, hanging out for the next handout life gives us, always watching out for our own interests makes us sink deeper and deeper into our own personal bubble of our world, not taking an interest nor caring about others and only seeing our surroundings and environment as an auxiliary support system for our own ego has resulted in massive exploitation of each other as fellow human beings causing bulk mistrust, fear and anger resulting in ill health mentally and physically.
Observance helps us to see much closer to reality. Suspicions are blown away when truth is discovered. Fear is embraced for the right reasons at the right times rather than irrationally and unhealthily. Anger rises far less and when it does, it is more justified and pointed much more accurately at the deserved cause. When these things all align, the on flowing effects are significant. Mental health is increased in the form of reduced stress and anxiety and as a result of increased mental health our physical health improves. Wellness and observance are directly related.
The other side of it is in relation to our intellectual and physical skills. Our skills are continually being eroded from non use. We used to hunt and gather food. We used to live in community together without TV or the internet. We used to make and farm and play. We used to be a part of our environment, respecting it and enjoying it every day. Now, because so much is provided for us, we don’t have to really watch out for danger. We don’t have to hunt and gather our food. We don’t even have to work much on social and family relations thanks to the plethora of social media always attached to us in some way, and if the internet isn’t working or we’re out of phone range, we can just turn the telly back on if it’s not on already.
Observance helps us to reclaim these primal skills. We don’t even have to forgo our leisures and creature comforts, just learn new ways to see and understand them and their place in our lives. Observance helps us to understand our environment like hunters and gatherers would have had to back in the day. It helps us to understand people and relationships like communities needed to before us. It even helps us to become interested in other people in ways that we never would have considered before. Observance helps us to become smart and sharp in our minds like the wise men and women of old. It helps us to be skilful, creative and inventive in ways that our ancestors were to create the amazing world we live in today.
I want you to know that observance works well and it has immediate effects. It is a daily practice and it does take time to become skilled at it, however the day you start practicing Observance you will feel sharp, alive and once again united with your surroundings. This has been my direct experience.
Imagination
Imagination – The Muscles and skin of reality
This is where it gets interesting. Observance and imagination go hand in hand. You can’t observe everything. There’s gaps in it. Time gaps, perspective gaps, distortion and interference gaps, etc. (eg: it’s hard to fully observe a bird that’s flying by. You can’t see one side of it, your eyes find it hard to keep up with the speed of it’s flight, you can’t hear it very well and you certainly can’t smell it.) Imagination fills in these gaps. It’s not always accurate but rarely needs to be.
Where Observance is the structure and skeleton of our reality, imagination becomes the muscles and skin.
The more you observe the world around you the closer to real you can make your imagination, but where’s the fun in that. Actually it’s a well accepted practice and science to use imagination for advancement and wellbeing. Look at the Placebo Effect as an example. This is a great example of someone believing something that’s not true (using their imagination to fill in the gaps of the observed reality around them) and their own minds creating a reality around that. Visualisation is a standard practice in many disciplines including business, martial arts, yoga, meditation, etc. To visualise (imagine) a future reality regularly and intently actually does help that reality to come into fruition. It happens again and again.
Your mind is a powerful thing.
You think it’s powerful now? Start practicing Observance combined with Imagination and you will become unstoppable.
What to expect from this blog
In this blog I’ll be exploring the daily practice of Observance and Imagination and also exploring questions like ‘what role does intuition play?’and ‘where does creativity come in to it?’. I’ll be going into the science, the physiology, psychology and the fun in Observance and imagination and most importantly, I’ll be teaching in a really down to earth and achievable way how to become more observant and imaginative day by day.
Everything on this site is based on things I’ve discovered, learned practiced and honed. I’m very happy to share it with you.
Enjoy
Steve Nossiter
Observance Imaginate 