Future Present

I of course must put in the plug for the website-- =)
Personal Enlightenment

Greetings!
I came across this article at a web site called http://www.future-present.com:
and really like much of it, enough to want to add to the archives of this personal transformation/enlightenment oriented blog.
As a reminder to when we get seduced into thinking that we can somehow change the fundamental way we are in the world when we are identifying with our "false" sense of self, ie, that sense that we are alone, seperate, disconnected, limited, etc..

-Mike

A Better Way to Communicate
By Andrew LeCompte

This is a personal article in which the personal enlightenment technology being referenced is based in Landmark Education by the author...

Scientists used to assume that people made most of their choices consciously.
They couldn’t prove it, but it was comforting to think that people were
consciously controlling their mind’s decisions.

Then, in the 1990’s, researching psychologists discovered a more accurate
explanation for how our mind perceives and decides. Let’s take a closer look at
the real causes of our behavior.

The Problem: Your Mind is Out of Control

In the last six years scientists have discovered startling facts about
unconscious, automatic processes in the human mind. These discoveries have
profoundly changed our understanding of what goes on when we communicate with
others. Here are some of the scientists’ conclusions:

You don’t understand what you see

You don’t know what causes your feelings

You don’t know what motivates your actions

When I first heard these ideas I felt insulted because I like to think that I’m
fairly intelligent. But gaining an additional thirty IQ points wouldn’t help me
to understand what I see. Nor would they help you. They could even get us
further off track because intelligence is not the problem.

The problem is that your mind, regardless of IQ, is not under your conscious
control. Your mind is running almost entirely on automatic systems for
perceiving, feeling and deciding what to do. Your mind unconsciously and
automatically judges everything it sees or hears, decides whether to like or
dislike it and then decides what you will do in relation to it.

Unfortunately, your mind’s perceptions and evaluations are often very mistaken.
Your mind sees attack where there is none. Your mind makes up negative cases
against people and then induces you to react defensively. As a result your life
seems to run normally until, wham, you get into a
conflict with someone and your peace, happiness and potential contribution get
derailed, often seriously.

Automatic Mental Systems (your "judge")

Social psychologists, led by Dr. John Bargh1 at New York University, have
demonstrated that the vast majority of our choices are made by unconscious,
automatic processes in our mind. Here is how an automatic process develops:

The mind has a tremendous amount of data streaming into it from the senses every
second. The eyes alone scan two billion bits of data per second. Our
consciousness makes sense of this data relatively slowly. A young child, for
example, over time learns that a certain pattern of visual data means a chair.
The child then looks for similar patterns and quickly discovers other chairs.
Eventually this task is delegated to the unconscious and recognition is
automatic. This is very helpful because the ability to do routine operations
unconsciously frees our conscious mind up for other things.

Unconscious information processing and decision making is much more powerful and
pervasive than had previously been thought. The principle social function of the
unconscious mind is to quickly judge whether other people and their actions are
good or bad. For this reason I will refer to the automated, unconscious systems
in the mind simply as "the judge." Bargh’s research has
identified three parallel systems of preconscious analysis, the judge’s three
functions:
The judge perceives and decides what people and things are. He does not do this
on the basis of an objective reality. He does this on the basis of what he has
been trained to see.
Therefore it is subjective. We assume that our beliefs about what things are are
the objective truth only because most of our beliefs are commonly held.

The subjective nature of the perception process is easier to see in the case of
someone who has a high IQ but a different set of beliefs about the world. For
example2, when a man, raised in a deep forest with only 100 yards visibility,
traveled for the first time in his life out on the plain, he was convinced he
was seeing "beetles and ants" turn into buffaloes as he was driven closer to
them. His false perception of distant buffalo as insects was the result of his
mental judge’s attempts to arrange visual data to suit his world view. Human
perception depends on what the judge has been primed to see.

Once the judge has made his determination of what something is, he proceeds to
select data that confirm his position. The judge chooses what he is trained to
look for, the "facts" that confirm his belief system. Hence, what you see is
only what you unconsciously expect to see, or your projection. The judge creates
your psychological situation. He creates your world.

The judge evaluates and decides whether he likes or dislikes every person or
thing and hence whether to approach or to avoid it. Bargh’s research proves that
everything is evaluated pre-consciously. That means that even before we
consciously know what something is, our mind has made the "like" or "dislike"
decision. Nothing is neutral and our emotions are directly wired into this
decision. Thus, if your judge decides that someone is "wrong" you will feel
angry toward that person.

The judge also gives us a motive, his own goal, or course of action for dealing
with the situation. He may choose to accept someone or to attack them.
Unfortunately, the judges of the world are a fearful lot and quick to defend
themselves.

Here is a closer look at how unconscious, automatic judgments influence us
socially. Your judge first evaluates others on the basis of his own stereotypes
and prejudices. When a person against whom your judge is prejudiced is upset and
calls for help, their call is usually interpreted by your judge as an attack. So
your judge provides his best defense: attacking them. When they react by
defending themselves, their defensive action seems to prove their original bad
intention. Thus the judge’s initial judgment of the person as hostile now
appears as though it was correct, making a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Because your automatic mental systems run unconsciously; you are not aware that
any of this has happened. Your explanations for your own behavior tend to be
inaccurate, after-the-fact rationalizations. Bargh cites a study in which a
participant, while hypnotized, was directed to crawl on her hands and knees
after awakening from hypnosis. When she woke from hypnosis she got down on her
hands and knees and said "I think I lost an earring down here." In a similar
way, your judge comes forth with plausible explanations for your behavior.

Your judge’s analyses and decisions occur in less than a quarter of a second and
are completely unconscious. According to Bargh, automaticity determines 99% of
your behavior. When you examine one of your decisions you experience it as
objective. However, the entire information base you used to make your decision
was selected by your judge to prove a point he had previously
established. Because you didn’t know that the data the judge passed on to you
was biased, you trusted it. This means that you cannot be objective.

You can read the rest of it here:

http://www.future-present.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0

-Mike

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