Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. Viktor E Frankl
In psychology it is said that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior, which is because of the deep programming we get from social and cultural conditioning during our upbringing. So, if we are to change our consumer behavior and begin to start living sustainably, it is imperative that we understand how to reprogram our thinking. This is amazingly simple to do BUT it takes a great deal of conscious effort to make it happen.
For many millennia it seems that men have always been in the mode of thinking, analyzing, and rationalizing, while women were the touchy, feely intuitive ones. Male artists were always different in that they tended to be more in touch with their emotions like the women than the rest of their male counterparts. Of course, this is gross generalization, but the point I am making is that the roles we gave to the genders for centuries has been breaking down during the last 50 years. The so-called left brained people tended to be the rational analytical types (e.g. men in control) while right-brained people tended to be women or artists (creativity). In the last post I introduced the Myers-Briggs concept of personality typing and idea of androgyny. While a simplistic way of looking at how we think it does allow us to see a path forward. What we need is not just ‘left brain thinking’ but ‘whole brain thinking.’ We currently live in a world where ‘left brain thinking dominates how we think – that is we predominately sense the world through our five physical senses and use data to make decisions. The problem with this type of thinking is that it is easily swayed into a way of acting based on the data that is presented. In a couple of early posts on this blog (Beliefs, Knowledge, Definitions and Reality Check on Research) I referred to ideas presented in the movie The Truman show on how we accept ways of thinking as absolute unless we question everything and learn to trust our own intuitive knowledge and feelings. But we have been taught to ignore the ‘right brain thinking’ when it contrasts with what our logical (left-brain) thoughts tell us. It is not completely correct but it is useful to consider that the ego comes from the left-brain and your spiritual self comes from the right brain. Thus most of the negative emotions come from the egoic mind and more loving and compassionate emotions from the spiritual mind.
Think about it, for centuries, one of the reasons men were leaders is that that they were ‘rational,’ and women partly denied access to leadership because they were touchy feely and irrational – that is because they went with their feelings and intuition. Indigenous tribes understood whole brain thinking quite well and always listened to the mothers – woe betide them if they ignored the mothers. Rational men pumped up with lots of testosterone inevitably thought that going out and killing the others was a good idea, but it was more often than not that the mothers laid down real rational about whether negotiation rather than conflict was more preferable. Intuition is associated with right-brain function and so is creativity. Intuition is the ‘sixth sense’ we are taught to ignore. The great thinkers of history all said that their greatest ideas rarely sprang from rational thoughts but seem to occur spontaneously from somewhere beyond their mind or through the dream state when the rational mind was ‘asleep.’ In other words, the root of intuition and creativity is to be found within the spiritual realm, which currently is seen as something incomprehensible to the ‘rational scientific thinking’ perspective. Can you measure creativity and intuition? Not really, but it can be readily inferred. I have talked about creativity throughout this blog (e.g. Imagination, Creativity, and Change 2 – reframing society 2). Creativity has been well studied and it is often referred to as the ability to see multiple answers to a question and not be bound by limiting assumptions – often referred to a divergent thinking (see earlier post Cultivating a Flourishing Future 1 – the Educational Challenge). While we extol creative thinkers and artistic geniuses, we scientifically decry intuition as a source of knowing, and as such discourage training our intuition. Yet, the importance of using the right-brain is crucial to most innovations and changes in our world. We need to use our whole brain if we are to ‘reprogram our minds’ to create a new world. Our rational minds don’t seem to be able to get us there. A standard joke is that if women ran the world we would have a more much more compassionate governance but with intense discussions every month.
So, if we are to start thinking with our whole brain, what do we need to do? Spiritual guru Joe Dispenza has written and trained about this for many years. Our mental energy literally flows to what we focus upon. When our thinking creates an emotional state it also triggers a cascade of biochemical reactions that we interpret as the feelings to those emotions. Consider how you physically feel when you are depressed or happy – it all starts as a thought! Emotions are just memories of past experiences. Dwelling on a past experience sets up a future reaction loop of similar experiences. Now you might think that dwelling on a happy experience would be a good thing, but what you end up dwelling on is the fact that you do not have that experience all the time! Living in the past is never a good idea. To control the biochemistry of your thinking you actually need to observe what you are thinking. The moment you stop and consciously observe what you are thinking is the moment you awaken to observing how you have been conditioned to think with specific patterns of disempowerment. The Left-brain rationalizes from previous experiences. The Right-brain sees new possibilities. The Whole-Brain recognizes how past experiences were simply lessons that can be used to promote positive outcomes in the future. When you teach your body to ‘respond’ instead of reacting you change the bodies biochemistry – progress through metacognition. You begin to transform not just to positive thinking but also to positive health, even when negative events may happen all around you. It was this that allowed Viktor Frankl to survive and even thrive spiritually in one of the worst of hells – a concentration camp. And how does this work? – to be continued…..
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