I would like to share with you - at potentially considerable personal expense - a fairly hilarious example of how what we think we know can shape our experience, and how a simple lapse in memory turned into a rather marvelous introspective, and outrospective, moment about expectations, assumptions and our ideas about the way the world works.
Autumn is upon us and, here in the Northeast, the season is changing fairly quickly. Although the days remain comfortable, in the late afternoon, when the waning summer sun begins to slip behind the Berkshire foothills, the temperature drops precipitously.
I have not yet had time to collect cord wood for the fireplace, so a few evenings past, when the temperature plunged into the 40's, I grudgingly turned on the heat. As I spun the little dial on the bottom of the wall thermostat, I heard that familiar click indicating the room temperature, and, with the house beginning to warm up, I went about my evening. The next night was a repeat of the same. Yesterday, when a storm came up from the mid-Atlantic, obscuring the sun in late afternoon, I again turned on the heat, pushing back against the damp and the cold of the coming night.
Just as my hand landed on the thermostat, it dawned on me that the previous Spring, after learning that one of the most wasteful bits of energy consumption is standby power, I had turned off the circuit breakers that controlled the radiators. The thermostats are wired "hot", so they were going to click no matter what, but they weren't turning the radiators on. The "heat" I had been feeling for the past few nights was, quite literally, all in my head. Clever fellow.
This is a roundly brilliant example of how what we believe to be true - our expectations and assumptions -- can quite tangibly shape our experience. It's like the old hazing ploy of tying a kid to a tree in front of a fire with hot pokers in it, blindfolding him, and then putting an ice cube on his bare chest. He starts screaming bloody murder because, while his skin knows the difference between heat and cold (sort of), his brain, living off of those pesky expectations, doesn't, and he thinks he's burning.
Just like that kid, I built a construct in my head -- what in metaphysics is called a thought-form - that was based on my expectation. The expectation was that turning on the heat actually turned on the heat, with the construct attached to that expectation, "The heat is on, I will be warmer" -- and off we go down the garden path.
My little self-imposed mind game even colored my perception of my dogs, sleeping in a comfortable pile in the corner. But they weren't cuddling up to the heat of the radiator, as is typical and as I supposed - they were cuddling up to each other, trying to stay warm!
So, the garden path is a bit of a trap; a trap of expectations and beliefs that can lead us into all sorts of trouble. If we tell ourselves something, and believe it, we are stuck with that perception, and all of its trappings. Not only that, it's quite likely that, in service of those perceptions, we will do all sorts of things to validate and maintain them. With this in hand, we drive a groove into our behavioral matrix and, thusly, develop a habit of the mind, which, in turn, informs our behavior.
Here's comes the teachable moment. It is through these expectations, assumptions and ideas - our interior model of the world, of which we are a part - that we architect our lives. If we can shift those expectations, assumptions and ideas, we can shift the model, our experience and, more importantly, our self-perception, changing the manner in which this whole system - this behavioral matrix - informs our behavior.
Externally, this falls under the category of "say the words, ask the question". When I was in college, I had a professor who, on the first day of class, appeared to be not showing up, making us wait the requisite 20 minutes before we left. At 19 minutes 59 seconds, he climbed in a window, calmly walked to the front of the class, said quietly, "Question your reality.", and proceeded to hand out copies of Casteneda's "The Teachings of Don Juan". Things are not always what they seem; even more so when we impose our sometimes rigid expectations and all too often misbegotten perceptions upon them.
Internally, this falls into the category of "don't drink the Kool-Aid". If you think that you're fat, dumb and slow, you're going to be fat, dumb and slow because you feel that you're fat, dumb and slow because you believe that you're fat, dumb and slow. I once had a none-too-pretty, more-than-slightly-overweight friend who used to wear a T-shirt that said, "Fat Girls Should Not Wear Miniskirts" - with a miniskirt. She was, in a word, gorgeous. Not only because she thought so, but, more so, because she refused to buy into a potential construct of negative self-perception that was, by societal standards, almost too obvious to ignore.
Just so, our internal and external models of the world - our expectations, assumptions and ideas - are the templates of our experience. If we remain married to those models as absolutes, not recognizing that they are, indeed, flexible, malleable and, therefore, changeable, then we remain stuck in our constructs, quite literally creating a prison of our own device.
Stepping away, seeing things as they really are, seeing ourselves as we really are -- and none of that through the distortion of those rigid expectations or misbegotten perceptions -- gives us the opportunity to re-architect our models and, in turn, re-architect our lives and experience.
By the way, today it's sunny and 75. I'm opening the windows...I think...
© 2010 Michael J. Formica, All Rights Reserved
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