"BREAKING THE BARRIER"
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"BREAKING THE BARRIER" | |
| MAP |
When you change your address, you take your possessions and personality with you. When you change your job, you take your skills and your personality with you. When you set out to change yourself, it is your personality that is the problem you face. |
| The barrier to learning new ways is not so much one of gaining new skills as it is the problem of letting go of habitual ways of thinking and doing things. You are attempting to teach your mind new patterns of behaviour while using the old mind set that you are trying to replace. It brings to mind the story concerning the Society of Friends and the new schoolhouse. The Quakers, as they are generally known, make their decisions by unanimous vote. The story has it that, after much discussion, they came to the following decisions. 1. They would build the new schoolhouse. |
| For many years I had the habit, when I was sitting still and quietly thinking, of smoking tobacco. I never needed to distract my mind from my thoughts to carry out this secondary behaviour pattern. My hands would find my tobacco in whichever pocket it was, then roll the cigarette. Over the next fifteen minutes I would smoke the cigarette with only slight conscious awareness of what I was doing. Then I decided to quit the habit, at some undefined time in the near future. There followed a period of irritating frustration. While out walking I would decide to have a cigarette. Fine. I had the tobacco, and there, in another pocket, was my lighter. But, somehow, I had come out without any cigarette papers. At other times it would be the tobacco that had been left on my desk. Then my lighters kept being mysteriously mislaid. I was being forcibly made aware of the schism between the mind and body. I had made the intellectual decision to change, yet the body had aligned itself with the old personality that habitually smoked. My mind was purposefully 'forgetting' the paraphernalia that goes with the habit, while the body wanted things to continue as before. Now, years later, I can sit here, quietly thinking, and become aware of my hands patting my clothing as they search for the pocket containing the tobacco that isn't there. Old habits die hard. Because they are so hard to kill off, it is easier to replace them with new behaviour patterns. As the newer ones gain in strength, so the old ways wither away. Yet, years later, in an unguarded moment, one can find them springing to the forefront. |
| The mind is little different from the body in its desire to cling to the security of doing things the way it always has. Once we have adopted a belief, we tend to see more and more that reinforces that belief. What may have started out as an intellectually accepted view of reality, very soon becomes an emotionally held belief. One that is enshrouded by faith rather than supported by intellect. Something that is not to be questioned. Emotionally held beliefs are narrow in perspective and are strongly defended, constricting our ability to think clearly about them and related matters. We become incapable of accepting that our ideas may be incorrect. Such ideas seldom stand in isolation. They become part of a lattice in which each part is held in place by those to which it is attached. To question the structure is to shake it to its foundations. The longer that we have held on to a way of thinking, the longer that we want to cling to our emotional investment. It is far easier to reject new concepts than those that we have long accepted. New ideas often refuse to fit into old frameworks. When we have come to a conclusion about something, we have drawn a line beneath it, and thereby erected a fence. Beyond that point lie dragons. Once something is labelled 'this' it cannot become 'that'. We become uncomfortable with the thought that yesterday's truths are not always today's truths. Even more disquieting is the thought that they may have never been true in the first place. Just because we believe in something, it does not make it true. All too frequently we adopt a belief in things purely because we want to believe in them, or the source from which they came, or because we have not bothered to exam them. A percentage of what we believe in is pure rubbish that will not stand up to logic or intellectual examination. |