|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Perception as a Key to Transformation Last month I presented a smorgasbord of summertime spiritual adventures and mentioned that I would be attending an adventure of my own: a Living Deeply: The Art and Science of Transformation in Everyday Life (www.livingdeeply.org) sponsored by the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS). The workshop was a bit of a smorgasbord in its own right since it combined the results of ten years of research on the transformation of human consciousness with experiential exercises and insights from wisdom keepers from the world’s greatest spiritual traditions, both ancient and modern. I can write about the workshop, the Living Deeply book, and the accompanying Living Deeply Elearning Program and Living Deeply: Transformational Practices from the Worlds Wisdom Traditions DVD—and I will in my August column—but, the best way to get the flavor of the overall Living Deeply project is allow you to have some hands-on/heart-on experiences of your own. So, grab a notebook and a pen and get yourself to the Internet before reading another word. Perception as a key to transformation: 1. Close your eyes and think of a yield sign. What color is it? Write it down. 2. View the basketball video at http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/grafs/demos/15.html. In the video, three people in black shirts and three people in white shirts pass a basketball to one another. Count the number of times the team with the white shirts passes the ball to one another. Discussion—Don’t peek until you do the exercises! Yield sign: What color did you write down? Most people (including myself during the workshop) say yellow. The real answer is red and white. Yield signs in the U.S. have been red and white since the law changed in 1975. Basketball video: How many times was the ball passed by the folks in the white shirts? Answers usually range from 15–17. Did you notice anything else—something unusual—happening in the video? If you did, write it down. If you didn’t, view the video again, this time not focusing on anything in particular. What do you see? Most people now see a life-size person in a gorilla suit walk directly into the center of the basketball game, stop, pound on his chest several times, and saunter out. Did you? If you didn’t, look at the video again. Both of these exercises are about how we perceive our world. What does this have to do with transformation? A lot according to IONS researchers and Living Deeply authors Marilyn Mandala Schlitz, Cassandra Vieten, and Tina Amorok. The yield sign exercise demonstrates that perception, both individual and collective, can be imprinted and internalized so strongly that changes, new ideas, transformative insights, etc. may not even be recognized by the beholder, much less act as spring boards to positive expansion and broadened world view. The basketball video is part of a classic experiment conducted by Daniel Simmons, an associate professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who conducts research on inattentional blindness. Inattentional blindness is defined as people’s failure to notice unusual and salient events in their visual world when attention is otherwise engaged and the events are unexpected. This excerpt from page 24 of Living Deeply explains how experiments like this relate to the role that perspective shifts play in transformations: “Studies like this one suggest that our brains are wired so that we don’t consciously perceive even major aspects of our experience when our focus is fixed on something else ... These findings tell us that when we’re focused on something and encounter an experience that isn’t expected, we may not consciously perceive its existence. It’s possible, particularly in relation to sudden transformations, that when your attention broadens from what has been preoccupying it and is brought into a more open field of awareness, your inattentional blindness is “cured”—what you couldn’t consciously perceive previously is now revealed.” The Living Deeply research reveals that when we have a potentially transformative experience, we have two basic choices: to allow the experience to expand our world view and contribute to our transformation process or to stuff the experience into our current world view and refuse to accommodate or allow for transformation. Research indicates that those who choose to stuff the experience back into old paradigms actually become more rigid and defensive, building up new and increasingly fundamentalist walls. The Living Deeply authors point out: “What our worldview doesn’t expand to contain quite literally escapes our perception. We just don’t see it. This perception of reality colors our reactions and actions, every moment of every day.” One example of this from the Living Deeply book comes from David Sloan Wilson’s book Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society. Wilson recounts how Darwin as a young man studied under Adam Sedgwick, one of the founders of the science of geology. Before it was understood that glaciers had carved out the stunning valleys and gorges that pepper the earth’s landscape, it was thought that oceans (in particular the great flood described in the Bible) created geological features. In his autobiography, Darwin explains how, along with Sedgwick, he hunted for fossils without noticing the obvious signs of glacial movement. Darwin states, “... neither of us saw a trace of the wonderful glacial phenomena all around us ... Yet these phenomena are so conspicuous that ... a house burnt down by fire did not tell its story more plainly than did this valley ...” These exercises and observations on perception touch on only a small portion of the overall Living Deeply research—more about that and the DVD and Elearning Program next month. In the meantime, here’s some homework: Log on to YouTube and get some great insights into the Living Deeply project by viewing the following videos: Living Deeply - DVD introduction: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R65os0xHvwA Emerging World Views, part 2 - Current World Views http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdJFkwnr4DY&feature=user A World Transforming http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNkSDsOBE8Y&feature=user
Mary Montgomery is a certified web author and developer. Her company, |
|||||||||||||||||||||||
All content and articles copyright ©2008 by Lightworks Inc except where noted. All rights reserved.