I am coming close to deciding that I will not anymore go on the search for variables that are unknown to me, when it comes to making a decision. I am very close to deciding that I will take what I know of the situation as the temporal truth.
I am choosing to close the doors and not let my mind wander without a structure.
I was at a conference yesterday. Though the conference was about Desire and Entanglement from a Buddhist perspective, and the consequences of incorporating that into Western Psychology, my attention wandered elsewhere.
Two of the panelists were Jordan Peterson and John Vervaeke. They are a few of the most well-known and well-liked professors at UofT.
While making their respective points about desire, they both mentioned some stuff that combined in an interesting way for me to have me result in the conclusion above.
Peterson discussed the physiology of our brain structures - the details of which I won't go into - but his main point was, we go after what we desire. Our brains work towards getting what we want. However, when we fail to not get that a few too many times, we realize something is wrong. At those times, our brains re-evaluate, figure out what needs to be learned, what needs to be perceived and try to do that. That is a painful process, its a process of recognizing what we knew wasn't enough and did not work, and also that now a new territory has to be explored. But, the brain does it itself. Faced with obstacles, it goes looking for solutions.
My fear has been locking myself up in my way of perceiving the world. John Vervaeke, being a Cognitive Scientist, often talks about the problem of framing. How we frame the world is what we see. According to Vervaeke, we pay attention to a very small piece of everything that is out there. The reason for which is our natural limits for carrying cognitive load and so what we do pay attention to is guarded by our relevance realization field.
Relevance realization field is everything and anything that is important to us and stands out. We see what is important to us and we orient ourselves to what's important to us. We do not see all of what is out there. Thus my fear. I know that I do not know A LOT. And I do not know if what I see is going to lead me to difficult situations.
The solution I thought of was to try to keep my eyes open. I was speaking with Jordan Peterson once and he advised that I "listen to people", really listen to people to see what else is happening out there, and to see what I don't see. I don't quite remember when that conversation happened, but since then, I have been trying to keeps my ears open. I have been listening to people and trying to decipher their way of looking at the world. I haven't been doing any of this consciously.
Even while I write that, I am not too sure how open I have been :). I know there are no limits to how much I can learn and there's definitely no limit to how much there is out there in the world. So who knows, maybe I haven't actually been as open as I think I have :). *ouch*
Moving on, the knowledge that I know little has had more of an impact on me than whatever I have been able to learn from people. I have noticed that people think differently from me (duh!), but not in any Earth shattering ways. The idea however has made me anxious about my decisions. I am forever worried if I am missing out on crucial information that would change my mind and have me see the world/that particular situation differently. I mean, my way of looking at situations has been wrong a number of times and it would only be sane (of my brain) to not misunderstand situations.
Now, Vervaeke yesterday mentioned something very casually that there's no way we can always know everything there is to know (Duh, again!). I needed to hear that, because in my mind if I make an ineffective decision because of my lack of knowledge, I am to blame because I could have always learned more.
Then, Peterson, earlier that day, had said that the brain itself goes looking for alternative routes. Someone asked him what you should do when you don't know what to do; when your previous path did not work out. He said, "prepare to do everything". (Yes, I know how annoying that answer is.) But then he added, "we can only do three things when we don't know what to do; freeze, prepare to do everything or just do SOMEthing". The three may even happen in succession, and that makes sense.
So here's what I am going to do. I am going to close my open doors. I will take what I know at face value. I feel like I can trust myself in making mostly good judgments for most part. But for times when I don't think something is going right, I will consciously try to figure out what one door needs to be opened and open just that one, go out and seek different answers to just that question. If I do learn something very differently, I will sit down and think about my perspective and the new perspective, I'll consciously see what needs to be changed in my perspective and hopefully either make that change, or go looking for more information.
I will not try to stay open to everything. This would also require that I need to express my point of view when I hear a different point of view. When I do hear a different one, I quickly get lost in thinking about that other way of looking at the situation.
So, here's the plan: I will stop thinking about variables that I do not know about. What I know is what I know. When someone mentions something different and it actually looks viable, I will definitely explore it more. And the consciously choose to either let it affect my perspective, or close that door forever.
-------------
Structured thinking is also called Vitakka and is one of the two kinds of thinking often discussed while discussing "Right View" in the Eight-fold path.
I am choosing to close the doors and not let my mind wander without a structure.
I was at a conference yesterday. Though the conference was about Desire and Entanglement from a Buddhist perspective, and the consequences of incorporating that into Western Psychology, my attention wandered elsewhere.
Two of the panelists were Jordan Peterson and John Vervaeke. They are a few of the most well-known and well-liked professors at UofT.
While making their respective points about desire, they both mentioned some stuff that combined in an interesting way for me to have me result in the conclusion above.
Peterson discussed the physiology of our brain structures - the details of which I won't go into - but his main point was, we go after what we desire. Our brains work towards getting what we want. However, when we fail to not get that a few too many times, we realize something is wrong. At those times, our brains re-evaluate, figure out what needs to be learned, what needs to be perceived and try to do that. That is a painful process, its a process of recognizing what we knew wasn't enough and did not work, and also that now a new territory has to be explored. But, the brain does it itself. Faced with obstacles, it goes looking for solutions.
My fear has been locking myself up in my way of perceiving the world. John Vervaeke, being a Cognitive Scientist, often talks about the problem of framing. How we frame the world is what we see. According to Vervaeke, we pay attention to a very small piece of everything that is out there. The reason for which is our natural limits for carrying cognitive load and so what we do pay attention to is guarded by our relevance realization field.
Relevance realization field is everything and anything that is important to us and stands out. We see what is important to us and we orient ourselves to what's important to us. We do not see all of what is out there. Thus my fear. I know that I do not know A LOT. And I do not know if what I see is going to lead me to difficult situations.
The solution I thought of was to try to keep my eyes open. I was speaking with Jordan Peterson once and he advised that I "listen to people", really listen to people to see what else is happening out there, and to see what I don't see. I don't quite remember when that conversation happened, but since then, I have been trying to keeps my ears open. I have been listening to people and trying to decipher their way of looking at the world. I haven't been doing any of this consciously.
Even while I write that, I am not too sure how open I have been :). I know there are no limits to how much I can learn and there's definitely no limit to how much there is out there in the world. So who knows, maybe I haven't actually been as open as I think I have :). *ouch*
Moving on, the knowledge that I know little has had more of an impact on me than whatever I have been able to learn from people. I have noticed that people think differently from me (duh!), but not in any Earth shattering ways. The idea however has made me anxious about my decisions. I am forever worried if I am missing out on crucial information that would change my mind and have me see the world/that particular situation differently. I mean, my way of looking at situations has been wrong a number of times and it would only be sane (of my brain) to not misunderstand situations.
Now, Vervaeke yesterday mentioned something very casually that there's no way we can always know everything there is to know (Duh, again!). I needed to hear that, because in my mind if I make an ineffective decision because of my lack of knowledge, I am to blame because I could have always learned more.
Then, Peterson, earlier that day, had said that the brain itself goes looking for alternative routes. Someone asked him what you should do when you don't know what to do; when your previous path did not work out. He said, "prepare to do everything". (Yes, I know how annoying that answer is.) But then he added, "we can only do three things when we don't know what to do; freeze, prepare to do everything or just do SOMEthing". The three may even happen in succession, and that makes sense.
So here's what I am going to do. I am going to close my open doors. I will take what I know at face value. I feel like I can trust myself in making mostly good judgments for most part. But for times when I don't think something is going right, I will consciously try to figure out what one door needs to be opened and open just that one, go out and seek different answers to just that question. If I do learn something very differently, I will sit down and think about my perspective and the new perspective, I'll consciously see what needs to be changed in my perspective and hopefully either make that change, or go looking for more information.
I will not try to stay open to everything. This would also require that I need to express my point of view when I hear a different point of view. When I do hear a different one, I quickly get lost in thinking about that other way of looking at the situation.
So, here's the plan: I will stop thinking about variables that I do not know about. What I know is what I know. When someone mentions something different and it actually looks viable, I will definitely explore it more. And the consciously choose to either let it affect my perspective, or close that door forever.
-------------
Structured thinking is also called Vitakka and is one of the two kinds of thinking often discussed while discussing "Right View" in the Eight-fold path.
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