Negotiability

Thursday, June 13th, 2013

Above all and everything, we are children of the land. And the basic understanding is that we’ve always been children of the land, and as children of the land we need to, to remember the old way of dialoguing with that that supports us and nurtures us. Everything around us has kawsay, is infused with life force.   (Don Alarijo, 2012)

Our ability to make greater perceptual shifts between psychic levels of engagement is a function of how available and negotiable we are in the world. Over-thinking what we think we see and assuming that we already know what we see will keep us trapped in the experience of consensual reality. The statement, “don’t confuse me with facts — I know what I know,” illustrates this point.

If we slow down and take time to pay careful attention to our thoughts, we may learn that we have made fundamental assumptions that determine how we perceive and interact with the world. We can usually track the inception of these assumptions, which influence our thinking, back to our experience at an early age. They usually started at a time when we were young and in the process of forming an internal cognitive map to make sense of our external world.

Frequently, as time has progressed, we have unknowingly come to accept these assumptions as being absolute truth and no longer question their validity. Upon closer examination, we may discover that we are operating from a system of beliefs that has little bearing on our present circumstances. Sometimes, these assumptions are projected onto others around us, and we draw conclusions that may not necessarily be true.

There is a story about a young woman cooking a roast that illustrates how assumptions can be erroneous. According to the story, a girl was cooking and getting ready to place a roast in the oven. Before placing the roast in a cooking dish, she cut off both ends without thinking, as she had always done. Her friend who happened to be watching her cook asked the girl why she cut off both of the ends. The girl replied to her friend, “This is the way my family has always done it. My mother and my grandmother always prepared roasts in this fashion, and now this is the way I do it.” Later, the girl gave her friend’s question more thought and realized that she really did not know the reason why the ends of the roast were cut. The girl went to see her grandmother and asked her grandmother why it was necessary to cut off the ends of a roast before cooking it. The grandmother laughed and replied, “It isn’t! We only did that when our oven was too small to fit the roast inside of it any other way!”

Deborah Bryon, Ph.D.

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