This Whole #$*@! Notion of Truth

I should have known I was in for it when my first thought of the week was,  There is still so much we don’t know about the brain.  What if what people see is actually filtered through a part of our brains that is unique from person to person?  And therefore, what if even though we assume we are all seeing something the same way (for example, the same colours in the same way), our experiences are completely different?  What if what I define as “green” and what each other person defines as “green” isn’t actually the same at all?  What if someone else is calling something “green” but they are actually seeing what I would call “orange”?  What if, in fact, we are only seeing similar shapes and sharing labels based on completely varied interpretations of colour? On and on the list of questions continued.

When I observe a mature douglas fir, I see a ruddy textured trunk that I label brown, perhaps even chocolatey brown or brown with a hint of orange.  I see pointy needles of various lengths that I might label minty or lime green if they are young, or when fully developed I may determine them comparable to fern green or hunter green (whatever that is, other than a man-made name for a 1994 vinage set of queen-sized Ralph Lauren sheets).  You may agree with my labeled-interpretation.  You may even offer an alternate labeled-interpretation that I completely agree with.  But still, we don’t know with absolute certainty that our perceptions match.  It seems to me that language has only become a marker of our limitations.

I doesn’t sound like much.  I know, it seems ridiculous to even waste time thinking about it.  But, I’m back in school, and damn-it I’m paying good money (uh, I *will* be paying good money when the government forces me to begin paying off my loans again) to think about whatever the hell I feel like.  So a few days ago, bright and early and mildly hungover, the impossibility of accounting for certain assumed “Truths” challenged me to a staring contest.

Now, I love the idea of being able, truly, to embrace ambiguity as it presents itself, and so to be able to fully engage in every moment.  However, when it comes right down to it, that’s a loaded ideal that I am not remotely ready to live up to.  I like clarity.  I prefer succinct explanations.  I insist on actively digging deeper until I find any answer I happen to be looking for.  For whatever reason, I need to know that the the facts are absolutely before I can, in good conscience, incorporate an assertion into my belief system.  and I prefer to be the guardian of all the answers.  All in all, I resist ambiguity instead of doing what I know is right (at least sometimes): surrendering to it.

And so, this idea that the way in which each individual  “seer” (by “seer” I mean a sighted individual who has not been identified with a disability such as colour blindness) interprets our shared physical surroundings could be entirely different from the interpretation of every other individual “seer”, but that science may never be able to confirm or disprove an absolute truth in the matter, to put it in layman’s terms, is driving me nuts.  I am not a scientist.  In fact, one day I may find that scientists cleared the air on this issue long ago–by all means, please direct me to the appropriate resources if there are answers available of which I am unaware–In the meantime, I am going to continue exploring this idea that some questions simply may be unanswerable.  Some hypotheses can not be proven or disproven.  I guess at some point black and white are in and of themselves an ambiguous shade of grey.

Helpful Definitions

I just got to reading that last entry and realized how convoluted the whole monochronic/polychronic part is even if one is familiar with the terms.  So, I’ll try to help a bit over the next few entries.  For now, just a couple of definitions, later, more on the idea I was attempting to present.

Actually, since there is really no point in reinventing the wheel, there is a table at the following address that outlines monochronic and polychronic time-orientations pretty well:

http://hackvan.com/pub/stig/etext/monochronic-vs-polychronic-time.html

—The thought from my previous blog entry was prompted by a plenary address given by Patti Digh at the 2009 SIETAR USA conference in Cary, NC last week.  She was talking, in part, about the flexibility and depth of childhood imagination and the lack of depth and flexibility often limiting adulthood imagination. Right now, though, I am exhausted and need to sleep, so more about that later.

Some Thoughts by Which I’d Like to Live

Just a few things I’ve thought about or stumbled upon in the past few days.  Perhaps they are worth sharing; perhaps they will be allowed to motivate someone else to action.  Either way, I’d prefer to write them down (again, since most of them already went out via twitter) so that they might be given voice in my own life.  Here goes:

A lethal combination: Assumptions and unsolicited advice.

_____________

A powerful team: guts and imagination

______________

One way to prod the guts-imagination team into action: make a move toward the unfamiliar.

_______________

If…

Childhood : Polychronic :: Adulthood : Monochronic

and if…

Monochronic : Adult Imagination :: Polychronic : Child Imagination

then perhaps…

if in adulthood, as US American Interculturalists (i.e. Interculturalists generally aware of our culturally monochronic tendencies), we can adjust to polychronic time and work effectively with people from polychronic cultures (as so many of us believe we can do), then we should also, in adulthood, be able to re-develop the flexibility of childhood imagination.

and then just maybe…

we’ll re-awaken the creative vision within ourselves that once knew the table, couches and blankets to be, if only for an hour or two, our castles, our caves and our tunnels to other worlds.

_____________

see intercultural.org and sietarusa.org

Tolle on Grievances

“A long-standing resentment is called a grievance.  To carry a grievance is to be in a permanent state of “against,” and that is why grievances constitute a significant part of many people’s ego.  Collective grievances can survive for centuries in the psyche of a nation or tribe and fuel a never-ending cycle of violence.

“A grievance is a strong negative emotion connected to an event in the sometimes distant past that is being kept alive by compulsive thinking, by retelling the story in the head or out loud of “what someone did to me” or “what someone did to us.”  A grievance will also contaminate other areas of your life.  For example, while you think about and feel your grievance, its negative emotional energy can distort your perception of an event that is happening in the present or influence the way in which you speak or behave toward someone in the present.  One strong grievance is enough to contaminate large areas of your life and keep you in the grip of the ego.”  —-Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth, 65

Naming Baby

Picking a name for a blog is about as difficult, it seems, as picking just the right name for a newborn infant: in either case the “parent” hopes to choose an identifier that speaks adequately to the character, personality and even appearance of who/what the “child” will eventually become.  The fear becomes choosing something that will ultimately label and potentially limit its subject.  For example, say mother, in a moment of romantic idealism determines, “surely with that set of lungs my baby is destined to be a great singer!” And so, she names her baby boy Pavarotti, only to discover by age 5 that her child is tone deaf (and sadly destined to a more-painful-than-average adolescent experience filled with “Come on Povi [ha ha ha], sing for us!”).

During my blog-naming struggle the driving question was not merely, what do I want this blog to speak to, but more “how do I keep the name from limiting the scope of subjects I allow myself to explore?”  Eventually, I landed on a name expressing my life’s driving and ongoing effort;  Something that has come to comprise “Me” as an adult; an ideal that has led me in and out of faith, down various career paths, and on various, always intense, academic pursuits–most recently into the field of Psychology.  I settled on the name “Accounting for Truth” because I have felt the resounding negative impact of holding to a belief system under false pretenses, out of a multitude’s devastating disregard for contradictions and marginalization of those bent to question “the system.”

As a species we have watched armies form out of ignorance and manipulation simply because people were afraid to question a dominant voice and a heavy hand.  We have watched millions bow to over-empowered religious icons, most likely because mindless submission is simple.  I, like so many others, have been victim to the cancer of mindlessness living, and this blog is an effort to seek out and account for Truth.  In so doing, I understand it will sometimes be sensible and/or necessary to yield to ambiguity, to acknowledge the space between black and white assertions as the closest thing to Truth.  Regardless, if I or anyone else is going to label something as reality, we ought to be able to account for the details (the research, the experiences, the observations, etc.) that make it thus.  I supposes those details are what this blog is about.  Hmmm. Case in point: Perhaps she would more gracefully wear the name “Accounting for the Details.”