Theos-Talk Archives (March 1995 Message tl00409)

Paul J: <More seriously, people can read something
and see motives and attitudes that are simply not
there, because they have programmed themselves to
find what "proves" their attitude right.>

Paul, this is the conclusion that I came to some
years ago that led to my conviction that our
experiences tend to confirm our world view.
Because we always try to filter out anything that
won't fit into our current world view. But every
now and again we confront something that won't
fit, that is so large or so meaningful that we
can't ignore or filter it out. When this happens
(i.e., when an experience cannot be assimilated
into our world view) then we have a significant
emotional event (Massey, an excellent teacher on
organizational management, calls this a SEE in his
famous Massey Tapes). According to Jung,
failure to assimilate such experiences can lead
to a nurosis. If you ask magic users why they
ever went into magic, most will tell of a wild
experiences that they had and their search for
meaning (i.e., a wider worldview) brought them
into it. Some come into theosophy this way. But
until a SEE happens, we always filter out those
things that don't fit with our current world view.
It is interesting to me that after a SEE, we always
tend to fall back into filtering again. I did a
paper recently on the association of a SEE and a
bifurcation as defined in chaos theory using the
psyche as a complex system. Our psyches reach
bifurcations points all through our lives, and
only the flexible among us survive them. The
interesting thing here is that it is the
uncertainty at the bifurcation point that causes
our growth.  Creating order out of chaos is how
we grow and learn.

<The trick about responding to this is to avoid
judging back in retaliation.>

Right. I find myself doing this in regard to what
is being said rather than who said it. I have nothing
against the author, but usually just want to let
everyone know that another viewpoint is possible.
But I get tired of adding smiley faces after a while
or saying 'no flames' after writing something that
invites them. This problem goes back to earlier
discussions of cyberpathology et al. No easy
answers, except that we all need to agree to
keep things as impersonal as possible.
Attack ideas, not people. I have found out
that in most (not all though) cases, the real
differences are merely semantic in nature.

          Jerry S.