(From Handbook For Humans)
The previous section is an example of a paradigm. A paradigm can be thought of as a core idea, or a core way of looking at things. It can be thought of as the way we organize our experience, as our fundamental set of interpretations, or as a filter on our experience.
But our paradigms are not simply points of view; they’re much more comprehensive than that. They’re the very lens through which we look at reality. Furthermore, they’re like water to a fish—so fundamental, so all-pervading that it can be difficult to become aware of them at all.
When we do catch a glimpse of our paradigms, we don’t usually think of them as the lens through which we’re looking, but as reality itself. In a sense that’s true because they create our personal reality, the one that we live in.
Paradigms are self-reinforcing. If we fundamentally believe that the world is a terrible and bad place, we want others to believe it too; it reinforces our own sense of reality. If we believe that true love with a partner can never really happen, subconsciously we want to repeat our disappointing experiences with the next person so that we can be right again.
Does that sound dysfunctional or counter-productive to you? Probably. But does our mind work that way? Pretty much. It’ll do anything whatever to be right. Our ego-mind is basically a collection of deep points of view, or paradigms, trying to perpetuate themselves.
Early traumatic incidents function like post-hypnotic commands, like scripts for a drama. The subconscious noticed that even though such experiences were hurtful, we survived them. By its dream-like logic, then, the way to survive is to keep on re-creating such experiences. Freud called this the repetition compulsion.
Thus whatever we believe at the deepest level we’ll tend to experience over and over again in our life. But beyond that, we’ll come to believe it more and more. We’ll collect more and more evidence for it, while suppressing or minimizing evidence to the contrary. Thus each one of us goes to our death knowing that we were right about whatever it was that we were right about.
Let’s take a small example to see how it works. If we feel, for instance, that men with mustaches are impolite, we’ll bring that expectation to the next such man we meet. If he’s impolite, it’ll confirm our expectation. If he’s not impolite, he’ll become “the exception that proves the rule.” And let him be impolite just once and we’ll say, “See, I told you, men with mustaches are impolite.” We’re reinforcing our belief system, and at the same time shaping our personal reality.
Intensity of feeling is like the volume control in this process. Whatsoever we believe or feel strongly about we tend to create or attract. If we love bakers and hate butchers, we’ll tend to attract both bakers and butchers. If we strongly fear something we’ll often tend to attract that very thing, because the emotional charge we have on it lends intensity to the image of it in our primal brain.
In effect, then, the mind is like a broken record, repeating the same passages over and over. It has its “top 40 hits of the mind” that it likes to play over and over again in reality. Have you ever noticed that certain moods and thoughts, certain behaviors, certain kinds of problems or incidents come up again and again? It’s something that happens to everybody.
Everything that ever happens to us conditions us to some extent. Every thought we have conditions us towards having that kind of thought again. Every action we take sets up grooves in our mind which tend to repeat the action. Every feeling, belief, intention, situation, occurrence, thought and so on has a tendency to repeat. Aristotle knew this when he said, “Excellence is not an act, but a habit.”
The reason all this is important is that our paradigms have a determining influence on our attitudes and behavior. If we try to influence our attitudes and behavior directly, it’s not only hard work but it’s like pruning leaves from a tree. For each leaf we remove three more grow back. As every gardener knows, a plant is thickened by pruning it. Thoreau said:
"For every thousand plucking at the leaves there is one striking at the root."
That root is our deep outlook about life and the world. Thus when we work on our paradigms—our way of looking at things—we’re automatically influencing our responses and behaviors.
Suppose we encountered a stranger and he acted very preoccupied and insensitive towards us. How would we react? We might very well indicate some irritation. Now suppose we found out that he was acting that way because his wife or child had just died. Now what would our reaction be?
Notice that our attitudes and behavior would change automatically as our way of seeing the situation changed. Stephen Covey beautifully points that out.
He repeats a true story from the U.S. Naval Archives. It concerns the captain of a battleship on a dark, foggy, stormy night. A light is sighted that’s on a collision course with the ship. The battleship captain directs that a signal be sent to the other ship to change course. But the other ship signals back its refusal to do so.
The captain directs that a second signal be sent: “I’m a captain, change course.” The other ship refuses again. Angry now, the captain orders a third signal sent: “I’m a battleship; change your course immediately.” And the answer comes back: “I’m a lighthouse.”
Do you think the captain changed direction? Of course he did. Indeed, we can be certain that his whole thinking changed, his feeling changed, everything about him changed. His attitudes and behavior would change automatically as his paradigm shifted, as his way of perceiving and interpreting the situation shifted.
Trying to directly force changes in our attitudes and responses is the hard way to do things—besides which, it often just doesn’t work. Because our paradigms are like maps of reality. Having a poorly-fitting paradigm is like having the wrong map to represent the territory.
If we’re driving in one city but following a map of some other city, we’re going to act inappropriately, to say the least. We’re going to go down the wrong streets, lose our way repeatedly, be confused, etc. And no amount of working on our attitudes or behavior is going to make any difference.
Give us a correct map, however, and our driving will automatically begin correcting itself.
© 1997 by James Sloman
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