Beliefs Archives - Page 18 of 23

I Think; Therefore, I Pay Little Attention to What I Do*

March 6, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

We know other people based on what they do. How else could we know them? And we infer all kinds of things about them from their behavior—especially from their habitual behavior.

Say someone you know is routinely late, and his lateness affects you. He may be full of apologies each and every time. He may have reasons to offer up to explain his lateness. He may claim he really, really wanted to be on time—and that may really be true.

You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do. –Carl Jung

You can’t know for sure what he’s thinking, though; you can only know for sure what he does. And it will be next to impossible for you not to draw some conclusions about him based on his behavior. Such as:

He’s disorganized.
He’s inconsiderate.
He has a poor sense of time.
He’s self-centered.

You’d likely dismiss your friend’s vigorous insistence that he intended to be on time. Actions, you might be inclined to say, speak louder than words—or well-meant intentions.

Put the shoe on the other foot, however, and the story takes an interesting turn. When it comes to our own behavior, we’re more likely to expect others to take into consideration not just what we do, but also what we intended to do (or, in some cases, what we would have intended if we’d actually put any thought into it). In fact, we expect others to accept our intentions as being even more important—and indicative of who we are—than our actions. It’s the thought that counts, right?

All of us tend to grant much more significance to what we think, intend, plan, and wish for than to what we do. So if what we do misses the mark or doesn’t live up to our or someone else’s expectations, it’s entirely too easy for us to write off the behavior, dismiss it, or excuse it. That isn’t the real me. It doesn’t reflect who I am. It’s just something I do.

I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts. –John Locke

What we do says quite a lot about who we are—if not to us (because we’re not paying attention)—to other people. Other people are inferring things about us based on our behavior just as we’re inferring things about them based on theirs. If we recognize that what we do tells others who we are, we don’t have to expect them to try to read our minds in order to understand us. Of course, that means we need to pay more attention to what we do—as well as to what we say we’ll do.

*Slight apologies to Rene Descartes.

Reinvent the Wheel

March 3, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 2 Comments

Last spring when I was clearing stuff out of my apartment and garage, I noticed that none of my exercise equipment or paraphernalia ever made it into the recycle piles. I simply left it where it was without even considering letting go of it. I had to question the hands-off attitude since I hadn’t used any of that stuff in at least a couple of years. Then I realized that, of course, I intended to use some or all of it again…one of these days.

I had been thinking about getting back into strength training for several months. I already had a fold-up weight bench, two sets of dumbbells, and a program I had followed here in the privacy of my own home. So when I imagined doing strength training, I automatically thought of re-starting that program. That’s what I had done before. I knew how to do strength training.

The problem was I didn’t want to do that program; I didn’t want to do any program in the privacy of my home. I wanted to join a gym and work with a personal trainer. It took me a while to realize that the strength training program I had used in the past wasn’t right for me now. Holding onto the exercise equipment—and my belief that what I needed to do was what I had done before—was actually keeping me from doing what I wanted to do. In fact, it was keeping me from doing anything.

So I got rid of most of the exercise stuff, joined a gym, connected with a great personal trainer, and have been working out four times a week for the past four and a half months. I love it, and I feel great.

This wouldn’t be particularly interesting if were nothing more than a personal anecdote. But I’ve noticed I’m not the only one with this mindset. Two friends—one male and one female—both want to lose weight. Both successfully lost significant amounts of weight in the past. Both have grappled with the conviction that they know what they need to do, which is to replicate what they did in the past. And just like me and my desire to re-start a strength training program, that conviction has delayed their taking action.

Another friend wants to get a better handle on her day-to-day finances. She developed a system that she used in the past, and her first inclination was to go back to that system because it worked before. But she readily admitted that she didn’t really like it and didn’t particularly want to start using it again.

Whether it was exercising, losing weight, or keeping track of money, all of us got hung up on whatever we did that worked in the past and assumed that was the only way we could be successful in the present. Rather than using our past successes as motivation to figure out what would work now, we focused on the details of what we did before. We forgot that when we were successful the first time, we weren’t relying on past experience. We had to figure it out. (We also may have forgotten other failed attempts that preceded our successful ones.)

Our brains create the sense (illusion) of a continuous self. But our present self is not our past self, nor is it our future self. When we imagine that we “know how to do that” because it worked in the past, we forget we’re not that person anymore. Instead of trying to repeat what our past self did, we’re more likely to be successful if we start fresh—if we start by assuming we don’t know how to do that. Then we have an opportunity to find out what might work this time around.

Data’s Cat

February 27, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Data (Star Trek) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The world is made of stories, not of atoms. –Muriel Rukeyser

There is a world of atoms (the physical world or so-called objective reality). But that’s not the world we inhabit. It isn’t even possible for us to inhabit that world—at least not directly.

Even if all our senses are intact and our brain is functioning normally, we do not have direct access to the physical world. It may feel as if we have direct access, but this is an illusion created by our brain. –Chris Frith, Professor in Neuropsychology, University College London

And…

Asleep vision (dreaming) is perception that is not tied down to anything in the real world; waking perception is something like dreaming with a little more commitment to what’s in front of you. –David Eagleman, Incognito

The world we actually inhabit is made up of the stories we construct about the objects, events, and people in the physical world. Our stories are based on our impressions and perceptions of what’s out there. The problem is that we treat our impressions and perceptions—and the stories based on them—as if they are real and true.

The world of atoms constantly impacts us. And as it does, we are constantly interpreting, explaining, and assigning meaning to what happens. From moment-to-moment, we’re not aware of how much we don’t know, how much we’re missing, and how much high-speed processing our unconscious brain is doing to generate our impressions and perceptions.

We’re not robots or androids, nor would most of us choose to be. In Star Trek: The Next Generation, Lieutenant Commander Data was an android who inhabited the physical world and not the world of stories. He was superior to humans in a number of different ways. He didn’t make the kinds of mistakes people often make. Yet after spending time with humans, he opted to have an “emotion chip” installed so he could be more like us. He got a pet, an orange cat named Spot (who had no spots). There’s no logical reason to have a cat when you live on board a spaceship. Data’s cat signaled his entrance into the very human world of stories.

All of us, both individually and collectively, are driven to create and tell stories about our experience and then to believe that our stories represent reality. It’s how we make sense of life. The consequences can be amazing, amusing, or devastating. But whether our stories are good or bad, as long as we don’t recognize them for what they are, we’re imprisoned by them.

Not Dead Yet

February 24, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Most of us, at one time or another (or maybe even incessantly), want to know why we are the way we are. Why do we do the things we do, think the way we think, and feel the things we feel. But wanting to know doesn’t mean we can know. And trying to come up with answers is a seductive but futile pursuit.

The unconscious brain, which drives this deep desire to know, is a pattern-detector and connection-maker. Sometimes the patterns it sees and the connections it makes are useful, such as in scientific or creative pursuits (or even in helping us remember where we put something). But the unconscious brain just as often sees patterns and makes connections where none exist. It’s notorious for jumping to conclusions.

The conscious part of the brain gets to accept or reject the connection offered up by the unconscious. If the conscious part of the brain (what we think of as “I”) accepts it, our brain turns that potential connection into a real one and sort of cements it into place. Now we have an explanation. Now we know that this caused that: some event, situation, or experience that happened in the past is the reason why we do, think, or feel some particular thing today.

Chances are considerably better than average that we’re wrong. There are far too many factors that have gone into making us who we are, the majority of which we aren’t even aware of. But even if we somehow did manage to figure it out correctly, so what?

There’s not much power in reasons or explanations. In fact the more reasons we come up with to explain why we are the way we are today, the less power we have. The more we insist on being nothing more than the effect of hundreds of thousands of causes, the less freedom we have to be, do, think, or feel anything different.

It’s as if we’re trying to replace our actual fluid and dynamic selves with stone replicas of ourselves. Instead of being here now, fully present, we’re busy trying to explain how we got here. Instead of trying to live, we’re trying to not-live. All of us will be cold and hard as stone soon enough. Let’s not hasten the embalming process while we’re still breathing.

Destiny

February 22, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 2 Comments

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If you do not change direction, you may wind up where you are heading. —Lao Tzu

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