Lost in Translation II: The Takeaway (for me)

Celeste just wrote a wonderful reply to my Lost in Translation blog that I wrote earlier this morning, explaining a similar experience she had with respect to her brain not being able to slap any labels on something she visually experienced. This was my reply to her....

 

I think that another takeaway for me in this "exercise" if you will, is that we really need to strive to become AWARE of our own thought processes. Because our brains DO label things naturally (it's how we learn), if we are fed the wrong labels, or inappropriate labels we can often come to wrong conclusions.

This can be seen quite readily in the political debates, and the battles that those who deem themselves "liberals" have with those who deem themselves "conservatives". Incorrect information, misleading information, partial information, if fed to us "correctly" can truly colour how we see the world. This will then affect our judgement and how we act and react to other things that we see. This is what we would call one of our "JBOPPs" or "Judgements, Beliefs, Opinions, Positions and Prejudices". We all have them. We can't NOT have them.

But.....

But....


if we become AWARE, and MINDFUL, and are able to be the OBSERVER of our thoughts, rather than controlled by them... if we are able to understand that our mind belongs to us, but we are not our mind, then when an incongruous belief system based upon the labels we have learned to place on things arises, we can say...

woah...

wait a minute....

something isn't right here...

the thoughts my brain is having don't match the real world results...

so something is amiss...

let's look further into this.

This will then allow us to make changes in how we see things, or to "Choose to see things differently" from how we always have.

This is how we can grow.

But if we are unable to do this, then we stick extremely stubbornly like flies to flypaper, unable to separate ourselves from our belief systems, unable to make changes to the way we think when it is blatantly obvious that change is imperative.

And that can be a very slippery slope because then our egos, our very powerful egos start to defend our JBOPPs even when it is clearly obvious that what we are thinking is simply not true. But the ego refuses to be wrong, as wrong = death. So it will fight to the bitter end defending that which we perceive is correct, even when the entire world around us is screaming, "LOOOOOK!!!!!!"

This is a very important thing I have learned this year: to become the observer of your mind, the observer of your thoughts FREES you to change the way you see things, thus changing the way the world is.