What You See Is What You Get. But You May Be Blind And Not Know It

Happy New Year (okay, so I’m closer to the Chinese New Year than the Western one, but the sentiments are the same).

How many times have you heard, “Perception is reality?” or that “What you see is what you get?” These statements have profound implications. What I think is there may not be. What I’m sure is not there, may be. I can’t be sure that my view of reality has any reality to it. This includes my view of other people as well as my view of myself.

If one of your resolutions is to have better relationships in 2012, consider that conflicts exist because we don’t see what other people plainly see or, conversely, we see what other people are sure isn’t there.

I submit the following as evidence:

You may have heard of the experiment in which six people, three wearing white shirts and three wearing black, are videotaped for one-minute tossing a basketball back and forth. Later, a group of people watch a recording of this action and are instructed to count the number of tosses made by people in the white shirts.

Afterwards, the observers are asked two questions:

1.      1. How many tosses were made by the white team and

2.       2. Did you see the gorilla?

Say what?

In fact, after 35 seconds of the one-minute recording have passed, a person in a gorilla suit walks into the circle of players, thumps his/her chest for nine seconds and then leaves.

100% of the observers correctly counted the number of passes. 50% of the people did not see the gorilla.

Another famous experiment is one in which Stanford University psychologist David Rosenhan had eight volunteers go to psychiatric hospitals on the east and west coasts and claim to be hearing voices for a brief period of time (by that definition, we all should be admitted. If you doubt it, just stop reading and listen to your internal monologue including the monologue that asks “What voice?”). All eight were admitted to the hospitals. One was diagnosed as manic-depressive while seven were diagnosed as schizophrenic. They ended up staying in the hospitals for an average of nineteen days (the range was from seven to fifty-two days).

Nurses generally reported that these patients seemed perfectly fine, but none of the hospital psychiatrists or staff agreed. All were eventually released with a diagnosis of schizophrenia “in remission”

When the results of the experiment were released, Rosenhan was contacted by a psychiatric hospital to explain that they would never be fooled as others had been. Rosenhan told these hospital administrators that, over the next three months, he would send them fake patients to see if they would be caught.

Three months later, 193 patients had been admitted by the hospital. 41 were classified as imposters.

In fact, Rosenhan had not sent a single fake patient to the hospital.

You may ask, “So what? How does this help me in my life?”

Simple. When a conflict festers, we of course believe we are right and “they” are wrong. Belief in the “rightness” of our position is the basis for all conflict.

If you have any interest at all in resolving those conflicts, you should at least consider that the gorilla that the other person is insisting is in the room pounding it’s chest just might be there but you are so focused on being right that you just don’t see it. Perhaps you’re not seeing that you really don’t listen, that your point of view is not the truth but only a point of view or that your opinion is not a fact.

So for this year and beyond, in order to improve our relationships, we all must be skeptical of our own certainties about ourselves and other people.    

Transcending "Groundhog Day"

“Groundhog Day” is a great film because it captures so well the dilemma of being a human being and also offers a way to transcend that dilemma.

You know the story. A pompous weatherman from Pittsburgh (Phil Connors) gets stuck in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania because of a snowstorm. He is also stuck in February 2^nd, Groundhog Day, waking up each day to the same day, over and over and over again until, finally, he wakes up to a new day.

In essence, this is our fate. We know what tomorrow will be like and, with some variation, it will be just like today. Few of us will wake up in the morning and completely alter the circumstances of our lives. The circumstances may alter without our active intervention, but we’re not likely to quit our jobs, end our relationships, leave our children behind and run off to Bali or wherever we have dreamed of being. Some people do but they are usually running from the law.

In fact, a change in our circumstances may cause us to yearn for “Groundhog Day.” For example, people who have lost jobs or homes probably wish to get their old life back. The uncertainty of this economy may have you wishing for your own “Groundhog Day.”

Even as the day changes to February 3^rd, nothing really alters for Phil Connors either. In fact, at the end of the movie as he is walking with the woman he loves he says, “Let’s live here forever.” But if he does, he will meet the same people, he will eventually hear Sonny and Cher singing, “I’ve got You Babe,” the song he woke up to every morning when it was always February 2^nd and he will likely return to his job predicting the weather. Even if he returns to Pittsburgh, he will mostly interact with the same people he did when he left for Punxsutawney.

So why is Phil Connors happy? You could say, as he does, that it’s simply change that has made him happier. But a little reflection proves the fallacy of that reasoning. For awhile, a new car, job or relationship makes us happy. But eventually the car, relationship and job become “Groundhog Day.”

I suggest that what alters Phil’s world is that he sees something that had been a blind spot for him. He sees that it really makes no difference if he has to repeat the same day over and over and over again. In essence, that’s all of our fates. Rather, he decides that while he can’t alter his circumstances, he can alter his attitude and that transforms everything.

 

Ultimately, this is how conflicts get resolved, relationships heal and we become happy. If our circumstances never change but our point of view about those circumstances changes, then life alters.

Paradoxically, altering our point of view requires that we see what has always been there. We will see what has always been there if we give up our commitment to being right about our opinions, judgments and assessments. We might, for example, see that our opinion of those family members we are dreading to see during the holidays bear no relationship to the reality of who they really are.

As Rabbi Alan Lew writes in his book, “One God Clapping,” “We don’t realize how much our subjectivity is involved in shaping reality. When we do become aware of this, the world seems remarkably malleable.”