Attitudes, realities, and living in one's best
By Charles Jeanes
“Dear optimist, pessimist and realist – while you argued, I drank the water.”
—- signed, the Opportunist
I have quoted a fine example of Nelson wisdom here in past columns. “You create your own reality.” Other gems of the Nelson mindscape: “Everything happens for a reason.” “It must be meant to be.” “It seems like a negative thing, but there is an opportunity in this – one door closes and another opens for you.”
I cite these to justify why I am drawn to delve into the question of attitude and reality, the objective existing truth of things. What can I change in the exterior world by adjusting my interior reaction to that outside phenomenon?
There is little sympathy for the person who always sees the negative, the constant critic and complainer about the world. Some people have made criticism a career and do well – the media thinker who deconstructs politics or literature and shows the shadier side or the base egoism behind the activity of famous people. But most of us try not to have a reputation for negative commentary. People would avoid us if we were known to be a downer, a finder of fault, a personality who sees clouds in the sunniest of situations. Perhaps the humorous epitome of such gloom is the character from Winnie the Pooh, Eeyore.
I am myself constantly warned against my tendency to criticize and judge. I have raised my consciousness of it and made what effort I could to head off my own expressions of negativity. But anyone who has been a reader of this column knows my habit is to find a lot to dissect, analyze and judge negatively in the world around me. Capitalism comes in for a lot of bashing. Certain politicians, leaders, writers, have been attacked in this column. My mother tried to tell me, but I could not follow her advice: “If you cannot say anything positive, then don’t say anything.”
Whatever one says publicly is of course only a fraction of what one is thinking. In the privacy of my own mind, I am more rather than less negative. I would like to be different. I know if I think like that, I am all too likely to let it out in words at an unguarded moment. I would be very hard on myself if I habitually said negative things to my granddaughter. She does not deserve it. I do not wish her to be like me and I do not wish to model such behaviour.
On the other hand… Here is where predictably I would say something about the need for realism over an exaggeratedly-sunny, air-headed and too-easy optimism that I have seen in the Nelson alternative culture. But I will not.
I will try to get into the significance of the notion that the world I see outside is not the world that all other people see. I am not more perceptive than the people who do not criticize as much as I do. I simply see things differently. My interior space or attitudinal weather is part of what I am able to perceive. The senses I use to bring data “inside” my mind, the five senses and my thinking processes, are very particularly mine. The saying is, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” – and that makes the point well: the object called beautiful is not truly outside oneself. I call a thing beautiful, you call it plain or boring – and that tells us a lot about ourselves and not a great deal about the object. My eye holds the beauty, not the object.
Is this how I create the reality I live in? Do I live in the same world as you? What is the nature of the real? Is reality created by the mind that moves through it?
Science has been adamantly sure that it can describe a world that is real and not altered by the magical thinking of the humans who disagree about it. Science has praised itself for not being like religion. Religious people fight wars and kill the believers of the wrong dogma. A difference of opinion about God makes people enemies. Scientists proudly assert they are above such dogmatism. But the history of science has seen some notoriously definite cases when orthodoxy and dogma were impregnable to new ideas. While it is not often that two scientific schools would fight violently over a difference of theory as medieval crusaders and jihadists would, it is not self-evident that science is exempt from the power of mind to make things appear differently to different scientists. The ideal of objectivity is worthy but it can fail to keep scientists from blindness to new discovery.
Science itself, in the form of new ideas in quantum physics , now admits that the human mind is a cause with an effect in reality — our measurement of phenomena can change the phenomenon observed.
It is a significant finding of neuroscience, the study of the brain and the systems of its materials, that our opinions are physically rooted. Research has revealed which areas of the brain process information. When the mind receives information that is consistent with a theory or viewpoint a person holds, that data is processed in one area of the brain. But data which contradicts or undermines a deeply-entrenched perspective of one’s worldview, will be processed in another part of the brain. This suggests that we do not easily change our minds.
So, to sum up, it is radically important that a mind not become too entrenched in one way of experiencing the real world. Unfortunately the grey matter in our neuronal system, the chemistry and biology of the brain, seems to settle into patterns and thus generate the patterned behaviour we call personality. I have the character I am because of years of living and thinking and laying deep pathways in my mind that are the trenches where all thought and reactions drain into. All my decades of reading historical, political, and scientific writings, have contributed to my negativity. I have a typical pattern for understanding the outer world, and it is a critical perspective and a judgmental attitude. I judge it and it is found to be full of proof of human baseness and stupidity, and I ignore the evidence of our goodness and spiritual possibilities.
I have the capacity to change that habit of mind, that negativity. If I did, my changed attitude would not alter physical things exterior to my body, but I would move through those phenomena as a changed person.
I would be a changed agent of causation also. My effect on the outside would alter because my interior is altered.
I think the future is dark and I will tell you why if you ask. But if I could let go of judgment, if I were to allow that death, even on a very large scale, is not objectively negative — that there is necessity and order immune to my idea of what should be, what ought to be if only humans were better – then I would live in the same world but live with less negative expression and reaction. I would like that.
Charles Jeanes is a Nelson-based writer. The last edition of Arc of the Cognizant can be found here.
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