Change your lenses and filters to perceive a different world

Some fantastic words from Philippa Perry in How To Stay Sane.
Coutesy: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/02/05/how-to-stay-sane-philippa-perry/ 

We all like to think we keep an open mind and can change our opinions in the light of new evidence, but most of us seem to be geared to making up our minds very quickly. Then we process further evidence not with an open mind but with a filter, only acknowledging the evidence that backs up our original impression. It is too easy for us to fall into the rap of believing that being right is more important than being open to what might be.
If we practice detachment from our thoughts we learn to observe them as though we are taking a bird’s eye view of our own thinking. When we do this, we might find that our thinking belongs to an older, and different, story to the one we are now living.

          We need to look at the repetitions in the stories we tell ourselves [and] at the process of the       stories rather than merely their surface content. Then we can begin to experiment with changing the filter through which we look at the world, start to edit the story and thus regain flexibility where we have been getting stuck.

I am cuurently reading The Map by Collette Baron Reid. She probably read the above lines and has presented similar thoughts.

Your place is created by your perception. You see what you expect to see even though you're not fully aware that you are expecting that. The mind is wired very efficiently to look for evidence that you can apply what you've learned or experienced in the past to what you're seeing before your eyes in this moment. It's used to spotting the signs of danger and the potential for suffering. That's why it's difficult to break the patterns of thoughts and behaviour that may have served a protective purpose at some point in your life but which aren't working very well for you now. Your mind, like everyone else's is always filtering out the facts that contradict what you believe.

We have to evolve out of this limited way of looking at our lives. We need to become mindful of our filters and we need to change them. This way, we empower ourselves to make different choices and create new patterns and hence a new story.

Aren't these two very similar thoughts? Did they arise in two different minds independently or one was influenced by the other?

Nevertheless, the lesson is good. We use old filters. We need to keep changing our filters often, in fact every single day would be great. We will then 're-invent' ourselves and people can claim to see a new 'you'. That's what it's all about!

Information diet and information curation

While we spoke abt filters, here's some more.

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2013/08/101signals/

http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/magazine/17-08/by_media_diet

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/10/11/as-we-may-think-1945/

conversations about information overload, filtering, and our restless “FOMO” — fear of missing out, for anyone who did miss out on the memetic catchphrase — amidst the incessant influx. Bush worries about the impossibility of ever completely catching up and the unfavorable signal-to-noise ratio:

Those who conscientiously attempt to keep abreast of current thought, even in restricted fields, by close and continuous reading might well shy away from an examination calculated to show how much of the previous month’s efforts could be produced on call.

Mendel’s concept of the laws of genetics was lost to the world for a generation because his publication did not reach the few who were capable of grasping and extending it; and this sort of catastrophe is undoubtedly being repeated all about us, as truly significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential.
More than half a century before blogging, Instagramming, tweeting, and the rest of today’s ever-lowering barriers of entry for publishing content, Bush laments the unmanageable scale of the recorded “human experience”:

 

The challenge of transmuting information into wisdom given the scale of what’s available — a scale that has grown by an incomprehensibly enormous magnitude since 1945. He stresses, as many of us believe today, that mechanization — or, algorithms in the contemporary equivalent — will never be a proper substitute for human judgment and creative thought in the filtration process:

With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.

“information curation”:

There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world’s record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected.

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/03/16/percolate-curation/ 

“curation” - a drive to find the interesting, meaningful, and relevant amidst the vast maze of overabundant information, creating a framework for what matters in the world and why — is an increasingly valuable form of creative and intellectual labor, a form of authorship that warrants thought.

People really respond to other people’s enthusiasm about things.” ~ Edith Zimmerman

Ideas are the most valuable thing. Good ones make all the difference; bad ones can hold us back, maybe even destroy us. If we can focus on finding the right ones, helping distill them, and transfer them as quickly as possible, we can get more of that. Curation is that means to the end.” ~ Peter Hopkins

 

All this information overload is definitely not without side effects. We have no silence inside. We constantly worry about missing out info. We fear that we'll be left behind. Thing is,  everyone is going to get left behind! No one can curate so much info. What is the use of all this info that we blog about or put up on the internet? Is someone listening? My own blog is just an archive of the things I read. I read here and there and forget things. Just to have a place to go back to, I am kind of archiving my reads.. and my thoughts..so that SEARCHING the blog is easy and fool proof compared to searching my memory. So this blog is my working memory and my external hard disk.

Mental Bandwith

“Before internet connectivity poured from the sky, I was able to get on a train, plug in my Mac and have nothing to do for four hours but write. And so I wrote. I once bought a round trip ticket to nowhere just to eliminate every possible alternative… pure, unadulterated mental bandwidth.”

Fear is the enemy of creativity and innovation and of starting things. The resistance hates those things—they are risky, they might not work, so the resistance pushes us not to do them.
On the other hand, it loves the notion of to-do lists and favors and multi-tasking and yes, continual partial attention, because those are perfect hiding places, perfect places to avoid the scary work but still be able to point to a day's work, well done.

But if you have nothing else due, nothing else to do, no other measurable output but that thing you've promised yourself, if all your mental bandwidth is focused on this one and this only, then yep, you can bet that you will get more brave.

Before internet connectivity poured from the sky, I was able to get on a train, plug in my Mac and have nothing to do for four hours but write. And so I wrote. I once bought a round trip ticket to nowhere just to eliminate every possible alternative... pure, unadulterated mental bandwidth.
Plenty of places to run, plenty of places to hide. None of them are as important as shipping your best work today.

The importance of filters

We are bombarded with data all the time. When you sit to read an article, you can understand it only if you complete all the links it refers to.
So many things seem tempting to read. But, you cannot read it all.
The more I see, the more I realize the need to filter. My brain can only hold so much or digest so much input. So, to stay sane, yet well read, I need to know what to filter, what interests me and how to go about filtering.
My main source of data are:
The internet
Newspaper
Books.

Of these, the internet is the one that needs filters. The tendency to jump from link to link leads me astray. I skim - like more people do. I save articles and never read them. I either finish an article once it is opened or I know it's trash for me. So, I am going to cautiously improve my filter settings to filter all the spam directed at my brain.