Winning Anywhere - the Power of 'See'

Breaking Free … …when we start thinking we start from ‘images’ stored in our minds which are nothing but previous experiences called knowledge. It is useful to remember that every experience is stored in multiple images in different sections of our brain and body in form of frequency spectrums. So, with the help of such images collected from different parts of the brain (a storage device of the mind) and body we try to see a present situation or context by drawing in supposedly relevant images we find in our stores, which more-or-less closely fit the present situation. It can never be exact since every situation is uniquely different from any other previous experiences we have had. However, based on the rough fit we form an understanding of what is happening in the now. Hence we look for similar patterns ignoring the ‘no-patterns’ since we don’t have the any image of the no-pattern. Clearly the danger lies in leaving out portions of the present context for which we don’t have any relevant or closely matching images in our stores. Therefore, we inadvertently leave out portions we don’t understand thereby failing to have a complete understanding of the whole. The gaps between patterns and no-patterns, so essential to generate new knowledge, are left blank. So, it is easy to see how our closely held knowledge becomes part of our ignorance in any given situation. Now when something goes wrong we start looking back to find out what went wrong or why something went wrong. And what do we try to do? We start examining the events or thoughts that went before it. It is something like using a mirror to trace back our thoughts that created the present problem or situation. We take this to be a linear path. But hold on. Did the images line up in a linear fashion? No not at all. We just plucked them off from different portions of the brain and imposed them on existing contextual situations to make sense of ‘apparent’ reality by matching a sensed pattern. So we try to travel down the thought line to get to the root of a problem that lies in the past – a construct of the mind. In doing so we are again tied down to the past because we simply don’t have the images that match the gaps between patterns and no-patterns. We simply did not care to delve into the gap at all. The absence of knowledge of the gap is what creates all problems that we face. The third way by which we are tied to the past is when we think forward from where we are now. That is when we leap into the future. How do we do that? We again take help of the previous knowledge and our rough incomplete understanding of the present context and then try to select sets of images that come up in our minds, put them together to frame a possible picture of the future. This is mostly what we understand by imagining (can be done more constructively). We then evaluate the imagined future with reference to the previous knowledge we have stored. Again we inadvertently ignore the gap that would always be present. Think of the confusion that would occur when someone imagines and someone else evaluates (as it usually happens) or think of communicating your imagined story to another person. The two persons having two distinct sets of images in their minds would not be communicating at all. One wouldn’t understand what the other talks about. It would turn out to be like the Tower of Babel, which I suspect that is really what the Biblical story stood for. I find it extremely funny. Whether we try to make sense of the present or try to find a root cause or start imagining the future we are in some way or the other bonded to our past thoughts that effectively imprison us. An Experiment Now, imagine for a moment riding a thought wave (conceding for the moment linearity of a thought wave) being surrounded by a big spherical space with mirrors fitted all over the inner walls of such a space (an idea of our mental prison with reflecting surfaces that reflect the thoughts as it reaches the surface). Can we ever reach and break the wall and go beyond it? You know the answer. However, hard we might try we would never ever able to penetrate and go beyond the prison walls. Thoughts of the past are bounded by time and space and can’t escape the limited dimensions of space and time. This is exactly what is happening to us. When we examine a present context we unconsciously use the reflected images of the past. When we examine the cause of a problem we start off by bouncing off the reflected surface in our attempt to follow the old thought wave trying to go back in time. When we imagine the future we again use the reflected images to build up the future image which is unlikely to match the images formed in others minds (similar spherical spaces of others) or match the present context that we try to examine. So, we are badly trapped irrespective of whether we think about the present, past or future. We even feel trapped while communicating our thoughts and ideas to others living in similarly separate worlds of their own. Then what might be the way out of such traps and mental prisons we created? The secret then is to observe the present as it is. Good clear multisensory Observation is the starting point of the whole thing. We see patterns and no-patterns and the gap that exists between them. The challenge is to observe without any coloring of the past and consciously avoid false reflections of it. The next step is to question about what we are observing. Questions may be like: ………. This method of enquiry and learning might be called as Observation Based Learning.