Happiness is a Choice, by Barry Neil Kaufman
Dari Buku :
HAPPINESS IS A CHOICE by Barry Neil Kaufman
She had just celebrated her thirty-seventh birthday. She came, she said, to work on anger and forgiveness. Her mother had conceived her after being raped by an acquaintance. Wounded and meek, the woman never filed any charges. Now the child of that act of violence wanted to make peace with what she called "the unthinkable."
Her own successful marriage, her delight in her two sons, and the enjoyment of a developing sales career had been dimmed by the gnawing anger she directed at phantom images of a man she had never seen. Initially, she considered her intense emotions as a cross of outrage she would bear the rest of her life. Then, she held on to the bitterness to protect herself and those she loved from such "subhuman" behavior as the rape of her mother. Finally, exhausted by pain, she wanted to somehow move beyond her narrow view and come to a new understanding.
"This man has never seen me, though he knows I exist. He is old now, riddled with cancer. I have even located where he lives; I know his exact address. At first, when I found him I thought about cursing him or beating him with my fists. Oh, God, I want out of this misery and all I do is get myself deeper in. Instead of practicing peacefulness, I practice rage!"
No one would fault this woman for her wrath. Some might even see justice in a finger-pointing confrontation with her "father." However, she knew she had been twice the victim: first, of a stranger's violence toward her mother and then of her own emotional violence toward herself. The first violence had passed years before; the second continued simmering inside.
While exploring these issues, she came to a crucial awareness. "If I continue to see him as terrible, I will never let go. Never! I really have to look at this person differently for my own salvation.
" She shook her head and sighed. "Okay. This will probably sound stupid, but the man's a human being isn't he?" She smiled. "I know, Bears, you won't give me the answers; I have to find them myself. Okay, then yes, I agree with myself; he's a human being. Violent, probably miserable, but still human like you and me.".
"What does it mean to you to call him human?" I asked.
"It means he's fallible. And it means I don't have to hate him forever. If I could just figure out how to let go of this anger, well, then I'd be free and at peace with myself."
"How do you think you can let go of it?"
Her eyes closed as she covered her face with her hands. In a muffled voice, she said "I know how to do it, I really do. Forgiving him would be letting go." With those words she began to cry. In subsequent sessions and in dialogues with her own husband, she formulated a plan of action which would change her life.
Two weeks later, she flew to a remote Midwestern city, rented a car, and drove hundreds of miles to a small rural village. She telephoned this man's younger daughter, the product of an eventual marriage, and introduced herself without referring directly to the rape. The other woman hesitated, then refused to invite her to the old man's home. She announced that she would come anyway; they could turn her away at his door if they wanted.
Old paint peeled off the side of the house. Shutters hung askew beside blackened windows. As she walked along a dirt path to the front door, she saw the woman who must have spoken with her on the phone standing on the porch with her arms crossed.
"I won't stop you," the woman, declared coldly, then stepped aside while maintaining her obvious vigil.
After she knocked on the door several times, a man's voice told her to enter. One small lamp cast its dim light over the room. An old man, his shoulders hunched into his chest, sat quietly in a wooden chair. The deep lines on his face seemed chiseled by a crude and unforgiving knife. His reddened eyes peered at her uncomfortably. When he gestured for her to sit, his physical pain became apparent.
"I know who you are," he said in a whisper.
She couldn't talk. He was just a man, old and dying, nothing like the phantoms that had whirled in her mind. She struggled to find her voice. She had rehearsed the words hundreds of times on the plane. It's just a decision, she told herself.
Finally, in a whisper that matched his, she said: "I forgive you. I really do."
He nodded his head several times and then looked away. In a voice more audible, he said, "I'm sorry."
She rose to her feet. Just a human being, she thought, like me. Then she surprised herself by putting her arms around him. She had truly forgiven him. His words of apology had no meaning for her now; it was her new vision that had made her whole.
A vision (a frame of reference or viewpoint) is like an invisible friend we invent to help us make sense of unfolding circumstances. We create visions for the best of reasons: to protect ourselves, to honor those we love and to express caring. But we do not have to become prisoners of our perspectives; we can change them and our lives by developing a completely new world picture ... one human step at a time.
Our Beliefs Create Our World Picture, Which We Then Transmit to Others.
As individuals, each of us becomes a force within a shared field of ideas and visions. Two powerful aspects of our interactions can be discerned easily. First, we can acknowledge ourselves as receivers. We see, we hear, we smell, we taste, we touch and we consume and digest beliefs. Much like a television set, we receive a variety of signals. But now we can recognize our authority over the tuner or channel changer and ask ourselves what messages we want to invite into our homes and our minds. We are not talking about censorship or putting blinders on; we are speaking of exercising more consciously our right to determine the types of inspirations we want to bring into our lives.
In addition to receiving, we transmit our ideas and visions. As transmitters, we can be seen as similar to a television or broadcasting station. Our lives become beacons, communicating the attitudes we assume, the beliefs we create and the actions we take. We become more than role models; we seed the field of human experience with our perspectives and deeds.
A thirty-year-old mother, who had arranged private, individual sessions for herself and for her child at our learning center, asked in agony why her adolescent son would actually lift his hand to her and threaten bodily assault. When questioned gently and without judgments, the boy explained his action quite openly. Since his mother hit him and his sister to express her disapproval, he similarly used the threat of force to express his resistance to her.
Parents ask many questions about the perplexing behavior of their children. "Why does she complain all the time?" "Why does he shout angrily when he doesn't get his way?" "How come my child seems so ungrateful?" Although children learn from the media, friends and their own experiences, often the lessons learned at home have the most impact. We can use the behaviors of those around us to stimulate questions about our own transmissions. Do we complain? Do we shout? Do we fail to express gratitude? Our answers tell us not only what we teach those around us but also what we put into the human collective and reinforce for others as well as ourselves.
Our beliefs and attitudes not only bubble to the surface in our feelings and behaviors but also are apparently transmitted on subtle levels as well. Once, when working with a nonverbal special child, we introduced a volunteer into the room as an observer. The child withdrew almost immediately from participating with her regular teacher and scurried across the room, clearly putting distance between herself and this new arrival. When the volunteer left, the child rejoined her teacher and participated easily and joyfully once again. Later, when I questioned the young man about his experience as an observer, he admitted feeling exceedingly uncomfortable and judgmental of the little girl's wild head movements and hand flapping.
We have noticed over and over again that nonverbal children rely on their ability to pick up attitude "transmissions" even when the initiator camouflages his or her discomforts with smiles. They know. They have a capacity, akin to radar, to pick up non-visible signals. Words, even actions, do not distract them from getting a quick "fix" on a person's level of comfort. We all have that same capacity, but, unlike the special child, we have not maximized our skill. Many times, as verbal people, we focus on words alone. Yet on other occasions, we do "read" between the lines and take in data communicated less overtly.
The power of our beliefs and visions shape the character of our personal realities and impact on others around us. Recent scientific studies suggest that the "reach" of belief transmissions might go beyond anything we have ever imagined.
A contemporary biologist has noted a community of shared information among species, which he calls morphogenetic fields. Essentially, his unfolding theory suggests that species, even groups of species, share an invisible and intangible communications field which can be observed and tested.
Early experimental efforts to teach rats to move through mazes yielded some startling results. The first group of rats performed endless trial-and-error rituals before finding their way through the maze. They succeeded at the task only with great difficulty. The second group of rats appeared somewhat more proficient. Subsequent experiments with genetically unrelated groups of rats, who had never before seen such mazes moved through the mazes as if they had been pre-trained. Somehow training some members of the species impacted on the abilities of all the others.
In other research, a group of behaviorists took pigeons, believed to be quite uneducable, and tried a behavioral approach to teach them to peck on lighted panels in what became known as the Skinner box. Initially, it took a long teaching period to train the pigeons to just begin the pecking. Researchers find that pigeons now peck at lighted panels easily and quickly. Some people claim now that anyone could go to any city in the world, coax a pigeon into a Skinner box, and, in short order, perhaps only minutes, teach the creature to peck on lighted panels - a humorous suggestion about an outrageous yet testable reality. Teach one or more of a species and all the members begin to learn the lesson.
The implications escalate when we ask if our transmissions are confined to species within the animal kingdom. In 1966, one of the foremost experts on polygraph machines (lie detectors) tried a unique experiment. One morning, in his office, rather than hooking his lie detector to a person, he attached the electrodes to the palmlike leaves of a plant. His initial printout from the plant matched similar ones he had recorded when testing people at rest. He knew an individual under stress, frightened or agitated, would cause changes in the meter readings of the polygraph. Could he produce a similar response from plants?
He proceeded to water the plant to see if there was a measurable impact on the polygraph. There was no significant difference. Perhaps the analogy he hoped to demonstrate had no basis, he thought. However, he decided to escalate the experiment and precipitate stress by introducing a hot cup of coffee and dipping the leaves of the plant into the scalding liquid. Again, the reading did not register any significant change. He fantasized about what act he could perform to trigger a response in the plant if that was, indeed, possible. He considered finding matches and actually burning the leaves. As he rose from the chair to execute his idea, he noticed the readout on the polygraph moving frenetically. In subsequent experiments, he demonstrated repeatedly that his violent visualizations affected the foliage and plant life around him.
We could conclude from these studies that all living things communicate with each other through intelligence or morphogenetic fields. The implications are staggering. What each of us learns has the potential of becoming a message to all humankind and, perhaps, to all other life forms as well. Each life has profound significance.
A new question now arises. If we want to be happy and support a universe that nurtures such an endeavor, what data would we want to feed into the human collective? What would we want to engender and reinforce? What gifts of awareness, what deeds, would we want to give our children, our friends, our lovers, our parents, our community, humankind, the animals, the plants, even the rocks?
Whatever we put into the river will mix in the current and bounce back to us. If just one of us changes our beliefs and teaches happiness and love, then that attitude or information goes into the connective tissue of the community and enhances the aptitude for happiness of the entire human group.
People spend years, even lifetimes, rummaging through old memories and philosophies accumulated throughout the centuries in the pursuit of happiness or the promised land (where people are happy, loving and peaceful). The answer lies not behind us. We have to look forward toward a new vision that we can create - not merely in our lifetime, but right now!
The Way We Look at Life Determines Our Experience.
Such a simple insight presents each of us with an opportunity to make momentous changes in our lives. The only limits are the ones we create!
We can ask a new kind of question: not simply inquiring into "what is" but inquiring into what we want and what grasp of the universe would nurture and support a choice to be happier, more loving, more peaceful and more secure. Can we move away from the contemporary cauldron of pessimism to find a more useful and inspiring point of view? Rather than wait for a pie-in-the-sky apocalyptic event, we can take charge of our own evolution by changing our world view now.
The current cultural paradigm - the frame of reference from which we view the events unfolding locally and in our global village - suggests a scourge upon the land, with brother fighting brother, new diseases sweeping like plagues through generations of people, poverty and famine snarling at the doorsteps of human dignity, and a general ecological malaise hanging like a frightening veil over the planet's future.
Current events, as depicted by the news media, bombard our consciousness with one catastrophe after another, reinforcing a "victim" mentality. Reporters and newscasters endlessly parade, for our literary or visual consumption, the bodies of those killed, maimed or noticeably diminished by war, disease, violent crime, economic recession, poor parenting, drug or alcohol addiction, sexual abuse, food poisoning, train wrecks, air crashes, automobile collisions, tornadoes, hurricanes., floods and the like. Although we remain attentive, we numb ourselves, trying to put some distance between us and the brutality of those onslaughts. In the evening, we wonder how we made it through the day in one piece or, worse yet, how we will survive the unseen catastrophes of tomorrow.
We could decide, flat out, to stop watching and listening to the news ... and to stop reading it, too. We have made an addiction out of being "informed," as if knowledge of disasters could somehow contribute to our sense of well-being and serenity. Our lives will never be enriched by the gloomy pronouncements of unhappy people, fearing and judging all that they see. They follow fire engines racing toward billowing black clouds of smoke and ignore the smiling youngster helping an elderly woman carry her grocery bags. One dramatic traffic accident on a major highway sends reporters scurrying, while the stories of four hundred thousand other vehicles that made it home safely go unnoticed. Newscasters replay over and over again a fatal plane crash captured on videotape but rarely depict the tenderness of a mother nurturing her newborn infant.
Simple acts of love, safe arrivals, peaceful exchanges between neighboring countries and people helping each other, are noteworthy events. The media bias toward sensationalism and violence presents a selective, distorted and, in the final analysis, inaccurate portrait of the state of affairs on this planet. No balance here. We feed our minds such bleak imagery, then feel lost, depressed and impotent without ever acknowledging fully the devastating impact these presentations have on our world view and our state of mind.
Why not inspire ourselves rather than scare ourselves? We choose our focuses of attention from the vast menu of life's experiences. Wanting to be happy and more loving on a sustained basis directs us to seek peaceful roads less traveled. Though we might not determine all the events around us, we are omnipotent in determining our reaction to them. Some of us will live on the earth's crust searching for horror; others will lift the stones and see beauty beneath. Our embrace of life will be determined not by what is "out there," but by how we ingest what is "out there." Our view becomes almighty.
What we have been taught about ourselves and the universe around us conspires to have us believe that living requires awesome energy and great struggle. "No pain, no gain," we are told. "Life is a constant struggle." "You have to take the bad with the good." "You never really get what you want." "You're unlovable." "Something is wrong with you " (although it's never quite identified, you know it's there). "There is no justice." "No one cares." "Look over your shoulder and beware!"
These become communal mantras, shared with others and elevated to the status of treasured folklore. They color our vision and send us searching for the experience (rejection, attack, indifference) that we anticipate. Usually we find it! Our vision blossoms into a self-fulfilling prophesy, which each new experience tends to verify and reinforce. I never met a man who lived forever. I also never met a man who believed he could live forever. We become our beliefs. We get stuck in our heads.
Suppose we set aside the rigid concepts we might have learned about how the universe works. If we can now begin to entertain the possibility of many world pictures, then we might want to experiment by putting aside a logical, linear view of existence with fixed points and "hard facts" and consider a metaphor which reveals the ever-changing nature of the known universe.
We swim in a river of life. We can never put our foot into the river in the same place twice. In every second, in every millisecond, the water beneath us changes. Likewise, in every second, in every millisecond, the foot that we place into the river fills with new blood. Instead of celebrating the motion, we try to hold on to the roots and stumps at the bottom of the river, as if letting go and flowing with it would be dangerous. In effect, we try to freeze-frame life in still photographs. But the river is not fixed like the photograph and neither are we.
Ninety-eight percent of the atoms of our bodies are replaced in the course of a year. Our skeleton, which appears so fundamentally stable and solid, undergoes an almost complete transition every three months. Our skin regenerates within four weeks, our stomach lining within four days and the portion of our stomach lining which interfaces with food reconstructs itself every four or five minutes. Thousands, even millions, of neurons in our brain can fire in a second; each firing creates original and distinct chemistry as well as the possibility for new and different configurations of interconnecting signals. As billions of cells in our bodies keep changing, billions of stars and galaxies keep shifting in an ever-expanding space. Even the mountains and rocks under our feet shift in a never-ending dance through time. Life celebrates itself through motion and change.
Although we can certainly see continuity - seasons come and go, trees grow taller and people get older - we can acknowledge that each unfolding moment, nevertheless, presents a world different from that of the last moment. We could say that we and the world are born anew in every second and our description would be accurate scientifically. Therein lies an amazing opportunity for change. We can stop acting as if our opinions and perspectives have been carved in granite and begin to become more fluid, more open and more changeable, even inconsistent. We are in the river. We are the river!
Every stroke we make, every thought or action we produce, helps create the experience of this moment and the next. And the beliefs we fabricate along the way shape our thoughts and actions. Sounds rather arbitrary, some might say. It is! Quite simply, we try to move toward what we believe will be good for us and away from what we believe will be bad for us - operating always within the context of our beliefs. Even our hierarchies of greater "goods" and greater "bads" consist only of more beliefs. We hold our beliefs sincerely and defend our positions with standards of ethics or "cold, hard facts." We treat much of what we know and believe as irrefutable. We talk in absolutes. Once our beliefs are in place, we use all kinds of evidence to support them, quite unaware that we have created the evidence for the sole purpose of supporting whatever position we favor. In essence, we have become very skilled at "making it up."
Our Beliefs Create Our World Picture, Which We Then Transmit to Others.
As individuals, each of us becomes a force within a shared field of ideas and visions. Two powerful aspects of our interactions can be discerned easily. First, we can acknowledge ourselves as receivers. We see, we hear, we smell, we taste, we touch and we consume and digest beliefs. Much like a television set, we receive a variety of signals. But now we can recognize our authority over the tuner or channel changer and ask ourselves what messages we want to invite into our homes and our minds. We are not talking about censorship or putting blinders on; we are speaking of exercising more consciously our right to determine the types of inspirations we want to bring into our lives.
In addition to receiving, we transmit our ideas and visions. As transmitters, we can be seen as similar to a television or broadcasting station. Our lives become beacons, communicating the attitudes we assume, the beliefs we create and the actions we take. We become more than role models; we seed the field of human experience with our perspectives and deeds.
A thirty-year-old mother, who had arranged private, individual sessions for herself and for her child at our learning center, asked in agony why her adolescent son would actually lift his hand to her and threaten bodily assault. When questioned gently and without judgments, the boy explained his action quite openly. Since his mother hit him and his sister to express her disapproval, he similarly used the threat of force to express his resistance to her.
Parents ask many questions about the perplexing behavior of their children. "Why does she complain all the time?" "Why does he shout angrily when he doesn't get his way?" "How come my child seems so ungrateful?" Although children learn from the media, friends and their own experiences, often the lessons learned at home have the most impact. We can use the behaviors of those around us to stimulate questions about our own transmissions. Do we complain? Do we shout? Do we fail to express gratitude? Our answers tell us not only what we teach those around us but also what we put into the human collective and reinforce for others as well as ourselves.
Our beliefs and attitudes not only bubble to the surface in our feelings and behaviors but also are apparently transmitted on subtle levels as well. Once, when working with a nonverbal special child, we introduced a volunteer into the room as an observer. The child withdrew almost immediately from participating with her regular teacher and scurried across the room, clearly putting distance between herself and this new arrival. When the volunteer left, the child rejoined her teacher and participated easily and joyfully once again. Later, when I questioned the young man about his experience as an observer, he admitted feeling exceedingly uncomfortable and judgmental of the little girl's wild head movements and hand flapping.
We have noticed over and over again that nonverbal children rely on their ability to pick up attitude "transmissions" even when the initiator camouflages his or her discomforts with smiles. They know. They have a capacity, akin to radar, to pick up non-visible signals. Words, even actions, do not distract them from getting a quick "fix" on a person's level of comfort. We all have that same capacity, but, unlike the special child, we have not maximized our skill. Many times, as verbal people, we focus on words alone. Yet on other occasions, we do "read" between the lines and take in data communicated less overtly.
The power of our beliefs and visions shape the character of our personal realities and impact on others around us. Recent scientific studies suggest that the "reach" of belief transmissions might go beyond anything we have ever imagined.
A contemporary biologist has noted a community of shared information among species, which he calls morphogenetic fields. Essentially, his unfolding theory suggests that species, even groups of species, share an invisible and intangible communications field which can be observed and tested.
Early experimental efforts to teach rats to move through mazes yielded some startling results. The first group of rats performed endless trial-and-error rituals before finding their way through the maze. They succeeded at the task only with great difficulty. The second group of rats appeared somewhat more proficient. Subsequent experiments with genetically unrelated groups of rats, who had never before seen such mazes moved through the mazes as if they had been pre-trained. Somehow training some members of the species impacted on the abilities of all the others.
In other research, a group of behaviorists took pigeons, believed to be quite uneducable, and tried a behavioral approach to teach them to peck on lighted panels in what became known as the Skinner box. Initially, it took a long teaching period to train the pigeons to just begin the pecking. Researchers find that pigeons now peck at lighted panels easily and quickly. Some people claim now that anyone could go to any city in the world, coax a pigeon into a Skinner box, and, in short order, perhaps only minutes, teach the creature to peck on lighted panels - a humorous suggestion about an outrageous yet testable reality. Teach one or more of a species and all the members begin to learn the lesson.
The implications escalate when we ask if our transmissions are confined to species within the animal kingdom. In 1966, one of the foremost experts on polygraph machines (lie detectors) tried a unique experiment. One morning, in his office, rather than hooking his lie detector to a person, he attached the electrodes to the palmlike leaves of a plant. His initial printout from the plant matched similar ones he had recorded when testing people at rest. He knew an individual under stress, frightened or agitated, would cause changes in the meter readings of the polygraph. Could he produce a similar response from plants?
He proceeded to water the plant to see if there was a measurable impact on the polygraph. There was no significant difference. Perhaps the analogy he hoped to demonstrate had no basis, he thought. However, he decided to escalate the experiment and precipitate stress by introducing a hot cup of coffee and dipping the leaves of the plant into the scalding liquid. Again, the reading did not register any significant change. He fantasized about what act he could perform to trigger a response in the plant if that was, indeed, possible. He considered finding matches and actually burning the leaves. As he rose from the chair to execute his idea, he noticed the readout on the polygraph moving frenetically. In subsequent experiments, he demonstrated repeatedly that his violent visualizations affected the foliage and plant life around him.
We could conclude from these studies that all living things communicate with each other through intelligence or morphogenetic fields. The implications are staggering. What each of us learns has the potential of becoming a message to all humankind and, perhaps, to all other life forms as well. Each life has profound significance.
A new question now arises. If we want to be happy and support a universe that nurtures such an endeavor, what data would we want to feed into the human collective? What would we want to engender and reinforce? What gifts of awareness, what deeds, would we want to give our children, our friends, our lovers, our parents, our community, humankind, the animals, the plants, even the rocks?
Whatever we put into the river will mix in the current and bounce back to us. If just one of us changes our beliefs and teaches happiness and love, then that attitude or information goes into the connective tissue of the community and enhances the aptitude for happiness of the entire human group.
People spend years, even lifetimes, rummaging through old memories and philosophies accumulated throughout the centuries in the pursuit of happiness or the promised land (where people are happy, loving and peaceful). The answer lies not behind us. We have to look forward toward a new vision that we can create - not merely in our lifetime, but right now!
HAPPINESS IS A CHOICE by Barry Neil Kaufman
She had just celebrated her thirty-seventh birthday. She came, she said, to work on anger and forgiveness. Her mother had conceived her after being raped by an acquaintance. Wounded and meek, the woman never filed any charges. Now the child of that act of violence wanted to make peace with what she called "the unthinkable."
Her own successful marriage, her delight in her two sons, and the enjoyment of a developing sales career had been dimmed by the gnawing anger she directed at phantom images of a man she had never seen. Initially, she considered her intense emotions as a cross of outrage she would bear the rest of her life. Then, she held on to the bitterness to protect herself and those she loved from such "subhuman" behavior as the rape of her mother. Finally, exhausted by pain, she wanted to somehow move beyond her narrow view and come to a new understanding.
"This man has never seen me, though he knows I exist. He is old now, riddled with cancer. I have even located where he lives; I know his exact address. At first, when I found him I thought about cursing him or beating him with my fists. Oh, God, I want out of this misery and all I do is get myself deeper in. Instead of practicing peacefulness, I practice rage!"
No one would fault this woman for her wrath. Some might even see justice in a finger-pointing confrontation with her "father." However, she knew she had been twice the victim: first, of a stranger's violence toward her mother and then of her own emotional violence toward herself. The first violence had passed years before; the second continued simmering inside.
While exploring these issues, she came to a crucial awareness. "If I continue to see him as terrible, I will never let go. Never! I really have to look at this person differently for my own salvation.
" She shook her head and sighed. "Okay. This will probably sound stupid, but the man's a human being isn't he?" She smiled. "I know, Bears, you won't give me the answers; I have to find them myself. Okay, then yes, I agree with myself; he's a human being. Violent, probably miserable, but still human like you and me.".
"What does it mean to you to call him human?" I asked.
"It means he's fallible. And it means I don't have to hate him forever. If I could just figure out how to let go of this anger, well, then I'd be free and at peace with myself."
"How do you think you can let go of it?"
Her eyes closed as she covered her face with her hands. In a muffled voice, she said "I know how to do it, I really do. Forgiving him would be letting go." With those words she began to cry. In subsequent sessions and in dialogues with her own husband, she formulated a plan of action which would change her life.
Two weeks later, she flew to a remote Midwestern city, rented a car, and drove hundreds of miles to a small rural village. She telephoned this man's younger daughter, the product of an eventual marriage, and introduced herself without referring directly to the rape. The other woman hesitated, then refused to invite her to the old man's home. She announced that she would come anyway; they could turn her away at his door if they wanted.
Old paint peeled off the side of the house. Shutters hung askew beside blackened windows. As she walked along a dirt path to the front door, she saw the woman who must have spoken with her on the phone standing on the porch with her arms crossed.
"I won't stop you," the woman, declared coldly, then stepped aside while maintaining her obvious vigil.
After she knocked on the door several times, a man's voice told her to enter. One small lamp cast its dim light over the room. An old man, his shoulders hunched into his chest, sat quietly in a wooden chair. The deep lines on his face seemed chiseled by a crude and unforgiving knife. His reddened eyes peered at her uncomfortably. When he gestured for her to sit, his physical pain became apparent.
"I know who you are," he said in a whisper.
She couldn't talk. He was just a man, old and dying, nothing like the phantoms that had whirled in her mind. She struggled to find her voice. She had rehearsed the words hundreds of times on the plane. It's just a decision, she told herself.
Finally, in a whisper that matched his, she said: "I forgive you. I really do."
He nodded his head several times and then looked away. In a voice more audible, he said, "I'm sorry."
She rose to her feet. Just a human being, she thought, like me. Then she surprised herself by putting her arms around him. She had truly forgiven him. His words of apology had no meaning for her now; it was her new vision that had made her whole.
A vision (a frame of reference or viewpoint) is like an invisible friend we invent to help us make sense of unfolding circumstances. We create visions for the best of reasons: to protect ourselves, to honor those we love and to express caring. But we do not have to become prisoners of our perspectives; we can change them and our lives by developing a completely new world picture ... one human step at a time.
Our Beliefs Create Our World Picture, Which We Then Transmit to Others.
As individuals, each of us becomes a force within a shared field of ideas and visions. Two powerful aspects of our interactions can be discerned easily. First, we can acknowledge ourselves as receivers. We see, we hear, we smell, we taste, we touch and we consume and digest beliefs. Much like a television set, we receive a variety of signals. But now we can recognize our authority over the tuner or channel changer and ask ourselves what messages we want to invite into our homes and our minds. We are not talking about censorship or putting blinders on; we are speaking of exercising more consciously our right to determine the types of inspirations we want to bring into our lives.
In addition to receiving, we transmit our ideas and visions. As transmitters, we can be seen as similar to a television or broadcasting station. Our lives become beacons, communicating the attitudes we assume, the beliefs we create and the actions we take. We become more than role models; we seed the field of human experience with our perspectives and deeds.
A thirty-year-old mother, who had arranged private, individual sessions for herself and for her child at our learning center, asked in agony why her adolescent son would actually lift his hand to her and threaten bodily assault. When questioned gently and without judgments, the boy explained his action quite openly. Since his mother hit him and his sister to express her disapproval, he similarly used the threat of force to express his resistance to her.
Parents ask many questions about the perplexing behavior of their children. "Why does she complain all the time?" "Why does he shout angrily when he doesn't get his way?" "How come my child seems so ungrateful?" Although children learn from the media, friends and their own experiences, often the lessons learned at home have the most impact. We can use the behaviors of those around us to stimulate questions about our own transmissions. Do we complain? Do we shout? Do we fail to express gratitude? Our answers tell us not only what we teach those around us but also what we put into the human collective and reinforce for others as well as ourselves.
Our beliefs and attitudes not only bubble to the surface in our feelings and behaviors but also are apparently transmitted on subtle levels as well. Once, when working with a nonverbal special child, we introduced a volunteer into the room as an observer. The child withdrew almost immediately from participating with her regular teacher and scurried across the room, clearly putting distance between herself and this new arrival. When the volunteer left, the child rejoined her teacher and participated easily and joyfully once again. Later, when I questioned the young man about his experience as an observer, he admitted feeling exceedingly uncomfortable and judgmental of the little girl's wild head movements and hand flapping.
We have noticed over and over again that nonverbal children rely on their ability to pick up attitude "transmissions" even when the initiator camouflages his or her discomforts with smiles. They know. They have a capacity, akin to radar, to pick up non-visible signals. Words, even actions, do not distract them from getting a quick "fix" on a person's level of comfort. We all have that same capacity, but, unlike the special child, we have not maximized our skill. Many times, as verbal people, we focus on words alone. Yet on other occasions, we do "read" between the lines and take in data communicated less overtly.
The power of our beliefs and visions shape the character of our personal realities and impact on others around us. Recent scientific studies suggest that the "reach" of belief transmissions might go beyond anything we have ever imagined.
A contemporary biologist has noted a community of shared information among species, which he calls morphogenetic fields. Essentially, his unfolding theory suggests that species, even groups of species, share an invisible and intangible communications field which can be observed and tested.
Early experimental efforts to teach rats to move through mazes yielded some startling results. The first group of rats performed endless trial-and-error rituals before finding their way through the maze. They succeeded at the task only with great difficulty. The second group of rats appeared somewhat more proficient. Subsequent experiments with genetically unrelated groups of rats, who had never before seen such mazes moved through the mazes as if they had been pre-trained. Somehow training some members of the species impacted on the abilities of all the others.
In other research, a group of behaviorists took pigeons, believed to be quite uneducable, and tried a behavioral approach to teach them to peck on lighted panels in what became known as the Skinner box. Initially, it took a long teaching period to train the pigeons to just begin the pecking. Researchers find that pigeons now peck at lighted panels easily and quickly. Some people claim now that anyone could go to any city in the world, coax a pigeon into a Skinner box, and, in short order, perhaps only minutes, teach the creature to peck on lighted panels - a humorous suggestion about an outrageous yet testable reality. Teach one or more of a species and all the members begin to learn the lesson.
The implications escalate when we ask if our transmissions are confined to species within the animal kingdom. In 1966, one of the foremost experts on polygraph machines (lie detectors) tried a unique experiment. One morning, in his office, rather than hooking his lie detector to a person, he attached the electrodes to the palmlike leaves of a plant. His initial printout from the plant matched similar ones he had recorded when testing people at rest. He knew an individual under stress, frightened or agitated, would cause changes in the meter readings of the polygraph. Could he produce a similar response from plants?
He proceeded to water the plant to see if there was a measurable impact on the polygraph. There was no significant difference. Perhaps the analogy he hoped to demonstrate had no basis, he thought. However, he decided to escalate the experiment and precipitate stress by introducing a hot cup of coffee and dipping the leaves of the plant into the scalding liquid. Again, the reading did not register any significant change. He fantasized about what act he could perform to trigger a response in the plant if that was, indeed, possible. He considered finding matches and actually burning the leaves. As he rose from the chair to execute his idea, he noticed the readout on the polygraph moving frenetically. In subsequent experiments, he demonstrated repeatedly that his violent visualizations affected the foliage and plant life around him.
We could conclude from these studies that all living things communicate with each other through intelligence or morphogenetic fields. The implications are staggering. What each of us learns has the potential of becoming a message to all humankind and, perhaps, to all other life forms as well. Each life has profound significance.
A new question now arises. If we want to be happy and support a universe that nurtures such an endeavor, what data would we want to feed into the human collective? What would we want to engender and reinforce? What gifts of awareness, what deeds, would we want to give our children, our friends, our lovers, our parents, our community, humankind, the animals, the plants, even the rocks?
Whatever we put into the river will mix in the current and bounce back to us. If just one of us changes our beliefs and teaches happiness and love, then that attitude or information goes into the connective tissue of the community and enhances the aptitude for happiness of the entire human group.
People spend years, even lifetimes, rummaging through old memories and philosophies accumulated throughout the centuries in the pursuit of happiness or the promised land (where people are happy, loving and peaceful). The answer lies not behind us. We have to look forward toward a new vision that we can create - not merely in our lifetime, but right now!
The Way We Look at Life Determines Our Experience.
Such a simple insight presents each of us with an opportunity to make momentous changes in our lives. The only limits are the ones we create!
We can ask a new kind of question: not simply inquiring into "what is" but inquiring into what we want and what grasp of the universe would nurture and support a choice to be happier, more loving, more peaceful and more secure. Can we move away from the contemporary cauldron of pessimism to find a more useful and inspiring point of view? Rather than wait for a pie-in-the-sky apocalyptic event, we can take charge of our own evolution by changing our world view now.
The current cultural paradigm - the frame of reference from which we view the events unfolding locally and in our global village - suggests a scourge upon the land, with brother fighting brother, new diseases sweeping like plagues through generations of people, poverty and famine snarling at the doorsteps of human dignity, and a general ecological malaise hanging like a frightening veil over the planet's future.
Current events, as depicted by the news media, bombard our consciousness with one catastrophe after another, reinforcing a "victim" mentality. Reporters and newscasters endlessly parade, for our literary or visual consumption, the bodies of those killed, maimed or noticeably diminished by war, disease, violent crime, economic recession, poor parenting, drug or alcohol addiction, sexual abuse, food poisoning, train wrecks, air crashes, automobile collisions, tornadoes, hurricanes., floods and the like. Although we remain attentive, we numb ourselves, trying to put some distance between us and the brutality of those onslaughts. In the evening, we wonder how we made it through the day in one piece or, worse yet, how we will survive the unseen catastrophes of tomorrow.
We could decide, flat out, to stop watching and listening to the news ... and to stop reading it, too. We have made an addiction out of being "informed," as if knowledge of disasters could somehow contribute to our sense of well-being and serenity. Our lives will never be enriched by the gloomy pronouncements of unhappy people, fearing and judging all that they see. They follow fire engines racing toward billowing black clouds of smoke and ignore the smiling youngster helping an elderly woman carry her grocery bags. One dramatic traffic accident on a major highway sends reporters scurrying, while the stories of four hundred thousand other vehicles that made it home safely go unnoticed. Newscasters replay over and over again a fatal plane crash captured on videotape but rarely depict the tenderness of a mother nurturing her newborn infant.
Simple acts of love, safe arrivals, peaceful exchanges between neighboring countries and people helping each other, are noteworthy events. The media bias toward sensationalism and violence presents a selective, distorted and, in the final analysis, inaccurate portrait of the state of affairs on this planet. No balance here. We feed our minds such bleak imagery, then feel lost, depressed and impotent without ever acknowledging fully the devastating impact these presentations have on our world view and our state of mind.
Why not inspire ourselves rather than scare ourselves? We choose our focuses of attention from the vast menu of life's experiences. Wanting to be happy and more loving on a sustained basis directs us to seek peaceful roads less traveled. Though we might not determine all the events around us, we are omnipotent in determining our reaction to them. Some of us will live on the earth's crust searching for horror; others will lift the stones and see beauty beneath. Our embrace of life will be determined not by what is "out there," but by how we ingest what is "out there." Our view becomes almighty.
What we have been taught about ourselves and the universe around us conspires to have us believe that living requires awesome energy and great struggle. "No pain, no gain," we are told. "Life is a constant struggle." "You have to take the bad with the good." "You never really get what you want." "You're unlovable." "Something is wrong with you " (although it's never quite identified, you know it's there). "There is no justice." "No one cares." "Look over your shoulder and beware!"
These become communal mantras, shared with others and elevated to the status of treasured folklore. They color our vision and send us searching for the experience (rejection, attack, indifference) that we anticipate. Usually we find it! Our vision blossoms into a self-fulfilling prophesy, which each new experience tends to verify and reinforce. I never met a man who lived forever. I also never met a man who believed he could live forever. We become our beliefs. We get stuck in our heads.
Suppose we set aside the rigid concepts we might have learned about how the universe works. If we can now begin to entertain the possibility of many world pictures, then we might want to experiment by putting aside a logical, linear view of existence with fixed points and "hard facts" and consider a metaphor which reveals the ever-changing nature of the known universe.
We swim in a river of life. We can never put our foot into the river in the same place twice. In every second, in every millisecond, the water beneath us changes. Likewise, in every second, in every millisecond, the foot that we place into the river fills with new blood. Instead of celebrating the motion, we try to hold on to the roots and stumps at the bottom of the river, as if letting go and flowing with it would be dangerous. In effect, we try to freeze-frame life in still photographs. But the river is not fixed like the photograph and neither are we.
Ninety-eight percent of the atoms of our bodies are replaced in the course of a year. Our skeleton, which appears so fundamentally stable and solid, undergoes an almost complete transition every three months. Our skin regenerates within four weeks, our stomach lining within four days and the portion of our stomach lining which interfaces with food reconstructs itself every four or five minutes. Thousands, even millions, of neurons in our brain can fire in a second; each firing creates original and distinct chemistry as well as the possibility for new and different configurations of interconnecting signals. As billions of cells in our bodies keep changing, billions of stars and galaxies keep shifting in an ever-expanding space. Even the mountains and rocks under our feet shift in a never-ending dance through time. Life celebrates itself through motion and change.
Although we can certainly see continuity - seasons come and go, trees grow taller and people get older - we can acknowledge that each unfolding moment, nevertheless, presents a world different from that of the last moment. We could say that we and the world are born anew in every second and our description would be accurate scientifically. Therein lies an amazing opportunity for change. We can stop acting as if our opinions and perspectives have been carved in granite and begin to become more fluid, more open and more changeable, even inconsistent. We are in the river. We are the river!
Every stroke we make, every thought or action we produce, helps create the experience of this moment and the next. And the beliefs we fabricate along the way shape our thoughts and actions. Sounds rather arbitrary, some might say. It is! Quite simply, we try to move toward what we believe will be good for us and away from what we believe will be bad for us - operating always within the context of our beliefs. Even our hierarchies of greater "goods" and greater "bads" consist only of more beliefs. We hold our beliefs sincerely and defend our positions with standards of ethics or "cold, hard facts." We treat much of what we know and believe as irrefutable. We talk in absolutes. Once our beliefs are in place, we use all kinds of evidence to support them, quite unaware that we have created the evidence for the sole purpose of supporting whatever position we favor. In essence, we have become very skilled at "making it up."
Our Beliefs Create Our World Picture, Which We Then Transmit to Others.
As individuals, each of us becomes a force within a shared field of ideas and visions. Two powerful aspects of our interactions can be discerned easily. First, we can acknowledge ourselves as receivers. We see, we hear, we smell, we taste, we touch and we consume and digest beliefs. Much like a television set, we receive a variety of signals. But now we can recognize our authority over the tuner or channel changer and ask ourselves what messages we want to invite into our homes and our minds. We are not talking about censorship or putting blinders on; we are speaking of exercising more consciously our right to determine the types of inspirations we want to bring into our lives.
In addition to receiving, we transmit our ideas and visions. As transmitters, we can be seen as similar to a television or broadcasting station. Our lives become beacons, communicating the attitudes we assume, the beliefs we create and the actions we take. We become more than role models; we seed the field of human experience with our perspectives and deeds.
A thirty-year-old mother, who had arranged private, individual sessions for herself and for her child at our learning center, asked in agony why her adolescent son would actually lift his hand to her and threaten bodily assault. When questioned gently and without judgments, the boy explained his action quite openly. Since his mother hit him and his sister to express her disapproval, he similarly used the threat of force to express his resistance to her.
Parents ask many questions about the perplexing behavior of their children. "Why does she complain all the time?" "Why does he shout angrily when he doesn't get his way?" "How come my child seems so ungrateful?" Although children learn from the media, friends and their own experiences, often the lessons learned at home have the most impact. We can use the behaviors of those around us to stimulate questions about our own transmissions. Do we complain? Do we shout? Do we fail to express gratitude? Our answers tell us not only what we teach those around us but also what we put into the human collective and reinforce for others as well as ourselves.
Our beliefs and attitudes not only bubble to the surface in our feelings and behaviors but also are apparently transmitted on subtle levels as well. Once, when working with a nonverbal special child, we introduced a volunteer into the room as an observer. The child withdrew almost immediately from participating with her regular teacher and scurried across the room, clearly putting distance between herself and this new arrival. When the volunteer left, the child rejoined her teacher and participated easily and joyfully once again. Later, when I questioned the young man about his experience as an observer, he admitted feeling exceedingly uncomfortable and judgmental of the little girl's wild head movements and hand flapping.
We have noticed over and over again that nonverbal children rely on their ability to pick up attitude "transmissions" even when the initiator camouflages his or her discomforts with smiles. They know. They have a capacity, akin to radar, to pick up non-visible signals. Words, even actions, do not distract them from getting a quick "fix" on a person's level of comfort. We all have that same capacity, but, unlike the special child, we have not maximized our skill. Many times, as verbal people, we focus on words alone. Yet on other occasions, we do "read" between the lines and take in data communicated less overtly.
The power of our beliefs and visions shape the character of our personal realities and impact on others around us. Recent scientific studies suggest that the "reach" of belief transmissions might go beyond anything we have ever imagined.
A contemporary biologist has noted a community of shared information among species, which he calls morphogenetic fields. Essentially, his unfolding theory suggests that species, even groups of species, share an invisible and intangible communications field which can be observed and tested.
Early experimental efforts to teach rats to move through mazes yielded some startling results. The first group of rats performed endless trial-and-error rituals before finding their way through the maze. They succeeded at the task only with great difficulty. The second group of rats appeared somewhat more proficient. Subsequent experiments with genetically unrelated groups of rats, who had never before seen such mazes moved through the mazes as if they had been pre-trained. Somehow training some members of the species impacted on the abilities of all the others.
In other research, a group of behaviorists took pigeons, believed to be quite uneducable, and tried a behavioral approach to teach them to peck on lighted panels in what became known as the Skinner box. Initially, it took a long teaching period to train the pigeons to just begin the pecking. Researchers find that pigeons now peck at lighted panels easily and quickly. Some people claim now that anyone could go to any city in the world, coax a pigeon into a Skinner box, and, in short order, perhaps only minutes, teach the creature to peck on lighted panels - a humorous suggestion about an outrageous yet testable reality. Teach one or more of a species and all the members begin to learn the lesson.
The implications escalate when we ask if our transmissions are confined to species within the animal kingdom. In 1966, one of the foremost experts on polygraph machines (lie detectors) tried a unique experiment. One morning, in his office, rather than hooking his lie detector to a person, he attached the electrodes to the palmlike leaves of a plant. His initial printout from the plant matched similar ones he had recorded when testing people at rest. He knew an individual under stress, frightened or agitated, would cause changes in the meter readings of the polygraph. Could he produce a similar response from plants?
He proceeded to water the plant to see if there was a measurable impact on the polygraph. There was no significant difference. Perhaps the analogy he hoped to demonstrate had no basis, he thought. However, he decided to escalate the experiment and precipitate stress by introducing a hot cup of coffee and dipping the leaves of the plant into the scalding liquid. Again, the reading did not register any significant change. He fantasized about what act he could perform to trigger a response in the plant if that was, indeed, possible. He considered finding matches and actually burning the leaves. As he rose from the chair to execute his idea, he noticed the readout on the polygraph moving frenetically. In subsequent experiments, he demonstrated repeatedly that his violent visualizations affected the foliage and plant life around him.
We could conclude from these studies that all living things communicate with each other through intelligence or morphogenetic fields. The implications are staggering. What each of us learns has the potential of becoming a message to all humankind and, perhaps, to all other life forms as well. Each life has profound significance.
A new question now arises. If we want to be happy and support a universe that nurtures such an endeavor, what data would we want to feed into the human collective? What would we want to engender and reinforce? What gifts of awareness, what deeds, would we want to give our children, our friends, our lovers, our parents, our community, humankind, the animals, the plants, even the rocks?
Whatever we put into the river will mix in the current and bounce back to us. If just one of us changes our beliefs and teaches happiness and love, then that attitude or information goes into the connective tissue of the community and enhances the aptitude for happiness of the entire human group.
People spend years, even lifetimes, rummaging through old memories and philosophies accumulated throughout the centuries in the pursuit of happiness or the promised land (where people are happy, loving and peaceful). The answer lies not behind us. We have to look forward toward a new vision that we can create - not merely in our lifetime, but right now!
posted by Konsultasi Keluarga Muslim @ 7:50 PM
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