It's All About Perspective

"What we think, we become."

I've been thinking about this quote, attributed to Buddha (Prince Gautama Siddharta), all day.  It's a quote that pops into my mind a lot, but many times when I am working to manifest and bring about a better mindset and vibration for myself. 

As I was driving home tonight, watching the weird Tron-esque tail-lights of the car in front of me, I began to wonder.  Why is this such a big deal?  Why does this quote mean so much to me?  Why is it so powerful and what frame of mind do I think about it in?

I realized that often, when I begin to think of the statement, "What we think, we become" I am thinking of it as a warning to myself.  As in, think better thoughts or else things will get crappy.  That mindset.  I started to think of the root of it.  Why do I approach this thought from the perspective of a warning rather than a blessing? 

I know it;s deep in my family; my mom, my uncles, and I have always had that kind of sense of humor.  I've even had it, and in a way, it's served us quite well.  After all, if you can laugh about something then you don't have to completely fall apart.  I've often viewed it as a survival mechanism.  For me, utilizing humor is like using a shield in some circumstances.  It's a way of protecting myself, of not fully throwing in all of my cards so I always have a way out.  Of poking the holes in something so that it doesn't have to be what it is, so I don't have to be hurt or even disappointed.

Over the last few years I've learned that humor can be about so much more. But ingrained in me is this part of me that has a very morbid sense of humor.  It's part of my family and part of my lineage.  I'm not going to say it's wrong, because it's the way it is and it has brought me some relief, a pressure-valve of sorts, when things have been emotionally too intense to deal with.  But lately I've come to realize that, in my efforts to manifest the brilliant possibilities of life, I need to address the part of my humor that is a defense mechanism and an escape that no longer serves.

And that's where I started to think of B.F. Skinner.

B. F. Skinner was a behaviorist.  He was a psychologist who developed many theories on behavior.  As someone who studied behavior disorders in school, I spent a lot of time learning about B.F.'s theories and how they apply to the classroom environment.  Skinner had a way of breaking down behavior so it could be easily seen.  (I'm not sure if he's the one who thought of this initially, but either way it grew out of old B.F.'s ideas).  Behaviors occur in chains, called ABC chains. For every behavior there is an antecedant (something that causes it), a behavior (the actual behavior in question) and a consequence (what results from the behavior).  In the classroom, for example, if we look at the behavior of one student hitting another, we can examine it in terms of a behavior chain.  If we can find the antecedant and look at the consequence, we begin to find keys to unlocking the chain of behavior and changing it.

Which is where it gets fun.  This is where it also gets more complicated, but not really I guess.  The complex things about behavior chains it that they really don't occur in ABC sets - a behavior is never 'just' a behavior but can also be an antecedant or a consequence.  So that means behavior occurs in layers of chains rather than just in straight chains.  This also means that we have to look at the function, or the reason behind the behavior.

Typically, there are three functions of behavior - escape, access, and intrinsic.  Someone wants something, someone wants to get away from something, or it's a part of someone's biology that they really can't change.  So basically, according to basic behavior theory, all of human behavior can be broken into ABC behavior chains and classified into one of three functions, or reasons why.

Which is great if you're trying to manage behavior in a classroom, but not so great if you are trying to figure out the why of really crazy things, like low incidence high violence behaviors.  Why, for example, does someone suddenly decide to pick up a gun and go shoot someone one day?  Skinner and basic behavorial thought really didn't have a great explanation for this... after all, it's hard to establish the parts of the ABC chain if you don't have a baseline because it only happened once.

This is where the idea of the "cognitive filter" comes in.  This is the lens through which an individual sees the world.  So this, in my chain of thought, is where I started to think of Adrienne Rich.  

Adrienne Rich is a poet and feminist.  In my women's studies classes, she was also treated as a feminist theorist.  She wrote a piece called A Politics of Locations.  It speaks about how we are all affected, every one of us, by where we were born and how we are raised and what communities we live in, and no matter what we try we are, in many ways, born with and therefore must exsist within and work to acknowledg the privelige and or lack therof inherent in our 'location.' Adrienne writes:

As a woman I have a country; as a woman I cannot divest myself of that country merely by condemning its government or by saying three times "As a woman my country is the whole world." Tribal loyalties aside, and even if nation-states are now just pretexts used by multinational conglomerates serve their interests, I need to understand how a place on the map is also a place in history within which as a woman, a Jew, a lesbian, a feminist I am created and trying to create.

Our 'location' influences how we see the world.  This 'location' impacts and is part of our cognitive filter, our lens with which we interpret and disseminate information; how we interact with the world.  This cognitive filter impacts how we behave.\Life is not just a series of ABC events but a very complex, mushy conglomeration of thought and feeling and event and emotion.  It's beautiful.

So what does this have to do with the macabe humor of my family, or more importantly what I need to shed that no longer serves?  I don't want to let go of my roots - I do enjoy laughing with my mom and friends - but I want to shed using humor as a defense mechanism and an escape.  More importantly, I want to change my perspective - to work with all these bits and things inside of me, to see things like this quote:

"What we think, we become"

As not a warning but a blessing.

How beautiful to see the world in a way that sees the Buddha's statement as a blessing.  What possibilities are opened!  What opportunities for manifestation!  It's the chance to ride the universal wave!  If we are fully commited and fully open to recieving the bounty of the universe, anything is possible.  I truly believe that we create our own future - how affirming and amazing to realize that truly, the Buddha is right - what we think, we become. We can manifest our own amazing futures.

I fight my location, my cognitive filter, my every day behavior a lot - but now I've found that I'm fighting less and less and flowing more and more. It takes practice.  At first, I didn't notice when my filter changed and I began to think of warnings instead of blessings.  Now, with practice, that change in perception often seems like the change in a guitar when it's left too long; it sounds dissonant. Ever so slightly, but I can tell, and I am so blessed now to be able to see it.. to feel and hear it... when things are not as resonant as they can be.

I still need a lot of practice, but the universe provides many opportunities.  As a friend so recently told me, it's all in the perspective. 

"What we think, we become."

An amazing and wonderful truth.

The Emotional Body

I've been thinking about Joe Paterno a lot lately.  I haven't followed football in a while (Though I do love the Pack) and I really don't know much about the man or his career.  But I do know this: He died today at the age of 85 from lung cancer.

Before I go any further, let me say I want to send love and light and peace to his family.  It's hard to lose someone you love.   I also want to send blessings to Joe on his travels back to the other side of the veil.

Now I want to really touch on why I've been thinking of Joe Paterno.  In 2002, a graduate student told Mr. Paterno that he had seen Mr. Sandusky, an employee of Mr. Paterno, assulting a boy in the locker room.  A lot of news has touched on this subject, and people are still trying to figure out what happened.  One thing is certain, though - Joe knew what was going on, and he didn't communicate it very well.  He didn't call the police.  He reported it to his superiors, and nothing was ever done about it.  So, effectively, Joe swallowed this incident and lived in silence.

I'm not writing to criticize Joe.  I'm not really wanting to touch on the tragedy of the abuse or the scandal that followed.  What I do want to examine is this:  Joe, a man who saw something he never really communicated, lives for at least 8 more years with that knowledge.  The story comes out, he is fired from his job, he is diagnosed with lung cancer and dies.

From the shamanic perspective, if there is something that happens with the lungs or throat, it should be asked "What is not being said?"  I am a strong, strong believer that there are emotional roots to illness, and I wonder if Mr. Paterno's sudden decline into lung cancer has relation to some of the things he stuffed up in his life.

Now, I can't really say that I know anything about Joe Paterno.  Maybe his family has a pre-disposition for cancer.  Maybe he was a smoker.  Maybe... maybe... maybe... there are a lot of maybes, and I want to be very clear and say I do not mean to presume to know what Joe and his family have been through. But what I am going to take from this, what I do know (as mentioned above), is that emotion that is held on to, attached to, stuffed and never processed causes real physical pain.

I'm dealing with it in my own life.  Growing up with an alcoholic parent, I learned to stuff my feelings and never express them lest they be attacked or invalidated.  It was easier not to communicate than risk communicating and have what I was feeling completely ignored, or even worse to be punished for my words.  I was a fighter, for sure, and yelled and screamed, but I remember that there came a point where I realized that, if I just shut up and stopped talking, eventually, the yelling and anger and conflict would go away. So I stuffed everything, and didn't communicate, and learned not to "show my hand".  I kept my mouth shut.

Now, years of blocked emotion are working up to the surface.  Even now, as I write these statements, I feel tightening in my neck and jaw.  I didn't know then that those feelings could cause such physical pain, but now I know and am dealing with many, many years of not speaking, not using my voice, not saying what I needed. It's quite the process, and there are many layers, and for me I am grateful for what I have learned about my emotions and my body.

But I think of Joe Paterno, and wonder - did he have the same difficulty that I do, just in a different way.  I think of him, and remember the emotional roots to my own physical pain, and wonder.  In a way I'm grateful to him for teaching me a little more about the emotional body and the physical connections - from my own personal perspective I see him as an example of this.


My intention - after all, this is the "Manifestation Station" - is to take what I'm learning about my emotional body and clear all the crap.  To give myself love and balance, to parent all of my inner children and inner selves, and continue on growing and loving in this amazing, marvelous, beautiful world.  I think of the lotus flower - beautiful and bright, an amazing flower growing in mud and muck and dirt.  You'd think that would be enough - that it would be amazing all on it's own. We often assume mud and muck and dirt are negative - but when you think about all the life contained there, I think the lotus is even more amazing - to transform one type of brilliant, luminous life into something completely different and just as luminous - wow, that's really amazing.

In the end, I guess it goes back to the wave.  Or even the water.  Often, when thinking of emotion I think of water. This is consistent with the Dagara way of thinking; water can handle the depths of emotion.  When thinking of water, and emotion, and attachment/non-attachment, I also think of the Tao.  Especially this:

'The highest form of goodness is like water
water knows how to benefit all things without striving with them'

This quote from the Tao reminds me to live in the ebb and flow of it all.  To ride that universal wave.