I'd like to start today by sharing a folk tale from India about a group of blind men living together in a village. These guys had heard a lot about the stories of the dangerousness of the elephants living in their country, but really had no way of conceptualizing these creatures. With no direct experience to draw from, each had only their imagination to construct an image. They often sat around debating what an elephant must really look like. In fact, they argued about it so incessantly that the other villagers in their town grew tired of hearing the debates and finally arranged for the men to go and visit the Palace of the Rajah where there were many elephants in order to help them learn the truth about them. Once at the palace, the men had the chance to feel an elephant and then offer his interpretation of it. The man who felt the tail of the elephant described it as a rope. The one who felt its head described it as a pot. The one who touched the broad and sturdy side of the elephant described it as a wall. The men went on like this, each touching and describing the elephant based on their personal but limited experience of it. When the last one finished, the men began to argue over who's description was correct. Not surprisingly, tempers began to rise and eventually the men came to blows, so convicted where they have their own rightness. Now, the point of the parable is to provide an illustration of how inaccurate perception can be and how biases can prevent us from seeing the whole picture. In the story each man has a specific understanding of the elephant, but none have a sense of it as a whole. The reality is of course, constrained by their limited interaction with elephant yet each are certain that their specific experience represents the objective truth. As is often the case when people confuse their individual perceptions and beliefs for truth with a capital T, argument and conflict ensure. I share all this with you as a way of introducing this idea. Your beliefs about life and how it works do not include the whole picture. Your beliefs do not reflect all that's knowable about reality and they're not facts. They're just unconscious constructions. Models based on our own experiences that help us navigate the world. We begin constructing them as babies through our senses and perceptions and they're necessarily limited. The whole reality is unknowable. No one human being understands it in its entirety. In fact, from birth, what we're even able to experience a reality is fundamentally shaped by the limitations of our perceptive system. We don't particularly have world-class sniffers. Our eyes can't see in the dark. Each of us is limited in what we can actually know about the world because we haven't been designed to perceive it all. In fact, scientists are convinced that the amount of information we consciously perceive is extremely small compared to the amount of information received by the sense organs. According to neuroscientist Martin Zimmerman, we only perceive around 40 bits of information per second while our sensory systems are picking up information flow at a rate of 11 million bits per second. This implies that really only a tiny portion of the information available to us is processed at a conscious level. Add to this that the human perceptive system is designed for efficiency, causing it to cheat from time to time. You can see that our reality is undoubtedly not the reality. Here's a quick exercise that will help you see the tendency to cheat for yourself. Check out the image on your screen. What color are the diamonds you see? All the same or different. If your answer was that the shapes are different colors, you'd be wrong. Actually the four diamonds are the same color. This image is an optical illusion where the surrounding context, in this case, the differing background colors and the visual distraction behind the diamonds causes us to infer that these shapes are in shadow and therefore must be brighter than the actual stimulus provides. So when we look at them, we think we see different color diamonds, but in reality they're all the same. If you like these kinds of tricks of the brain, we've included a link in the resource section of this module. We can learn more about all types of illusions, optical, and otherwise. It's a fun way to learn about our trixie brain and how their drive for efficiency sometimes trips us up. In addition to limitations in perception, we're also limited by how much we can pay attention to. As you've heard me say before, we're actually lousy multitaskers capable of paying close attention only that a one thing at a time. We can't listen to multiple conversations at once, so taking all the data available in our visual field. So our experiences, already a subset of all possible experiences, are further limited by the things that you notice or pay attention to within them. If you go record shopping, for example, you'll tend to notice the records that are mostly relevant to you. Even if you walk the whole store, it'll be impossible for you to have noticed or recall most of the records in there, except for those that were loosely related to the type of record you may have been looking for. If you go in looking for a new jazz album, you might notice all the jazz albums. You might even notice albums of other related genres like blues or maybe even funk. But you won't even come close to noticing or remembering most of the records in the store. To keep with the analogy, think of your attention as being capable of holding just a very fine sliver of reality, teeny-tiny, like the size of a needle on a record player. We have limitations in what we're able to experience of reality and limitations as to what we're able to pay attention to. This all filters into what we tend to notice about life. Based on what we notice, we form theories and make judgments. For example, when you walk into a record store, you probably assume that you can buy a record player or record player parts in addition to records. This theory is likely based on your previous experiences in record stores, and from this theory, you make judgments. If you see a shop that looks like a record store and you believe that all record stores sell record players, then you suppose a judgment that you'd be able to walk in and buy a record player. We only have theories and make judgments about things that we've paid attention to or noticed. Our experience can be extended by listening to the advice of parents, teachers, and friends. But each of those sources is making judgments based on their own system of beliefs. You also have to make theories and judgments about which sources to trust. These four things; Experience, attention, theories, and judgments form a foundation that reduces the unknowable to a map or a model that can be used to navigate through daily life. In essence, we take the infinite complexity of reality and boil it down to something simple enough for us to understand, and this is a good thing. It's essential to our functioning. If we had to experience everything as new every time we experienced it, we'd be paralyzed. But it's important to understand that this boiled down reduction, this theoretical soup that each of us create for ourselves is what forms the basis for our beliefs, and as you can see, we've left out quite a bit of information along the way. This becomes dangerous when we confuse our beliefs for reality, which is an easy thing to do. All around us, there are multiple competing and conflicting narratives about how the world works, and each of us is convinced that our narrative is what's true. That's what was happening for me when I argued about politics with a stranger at a party. In those moments, I can see how she hadn't reached the same conclusions about what was going on and what needed to be done. I didn't see the ways that my beliefs and opinions had been influenced by my own experiences or by what I pay attention to, and I didn't remember that that was true for her as well. What could have been a productive conversation between two individuals coming together and sharing their perspectives in order to understand each other better was instead a civil but dissatisfying argument between two people trying to convince each other that their perspective was right. Moments like these are great examples of the necessity of mindfulness. The practice teaches us about the areas in our lives where we might be over-identified with our beliefs or clinging to our fixed views. It can help us understand what it feels like in the body when we're locked into what we think is right or true, and it helps us invite curiosity and compassion even to those moments where our heels are dug in the most. Of course, in my situation, I didn't realize that my heels were dug in and time to find a more collaborative way to engage. But my practice did allow me to reflect back on the situation with more objectivity, which helped me see my behavior for what it was and frankly for what it wasn't. It's very clear to me now that I was attached to my own point of view, and I also feel clear about what this felt like in my body. This new awareness will help me stay soft and open and invite curiosity rather than competition the next time I might be talking with someone who doesn't see the world the same way as me. In the next session, we'll explore how to identify and evolve the fixed views in your life so that you can reduce unnecessary suffering and meet life's challenges with greater resilience and ease. As you might be able to tell from my own example, it's not easy work, but it's crucial for continued growth and evolution. We all deserve to reach our potential, and examining beliefs that hold us back is a great step towards making that happen.
