Heroes Not Zombies

We have a real tendency to divide up our experience of the world, put the pieces into separate boxes and label them. Brian Broom talks about this in his excellent book, “Meaning-full Disease“. He says we discriminate, categorise and judge. It’s kind of how we make sense of the world. The human body is remarkable and is endowed with an incredible amount of sensory equipment to detect the world we live it – we sense light and colour, sounds, smells, textures and so on. In fact, our sensory systems are under constant bombardment. If we didn’t discriminate we wouldn’t be able to make sense of it all. We can only deal with so much at a time. We are pattern-seeking creatures, constantly trying to recognise and make sense of the sights, smells and sounds that surround us. Of course, we lose something in this process of discriminating. We ignore most of the signals coming our way and only pay attention to the ones that most interest us. As I said in an earlier post, “we are what we pay attention to“. If we want to grow, if we want to develop and change and not be stuck in deep ruts, then we need to shift our attention, to deliberately try to break our attention-habits and notice what else is in the world. I am a doctor specialising in homeopathic medicine. This is a method which is based on noticing difference. When a patient tells me their story, I don’t want to know just what symptoms they have in common with other patients I’ve known (so I can make a diagnosis), but I want to notice what is different, what makes this person unique. Picking out patterns is a good skill, but we just have to be wary that we don’t always only see the same old patterns. We also categorise everything. We love labels. Often a so-called diagnosis is nothing more than a label. I saw a little boy recently who had an itchy bottom. His mum said the paediatrician had diagnosed the problem as “pruritis ani”. That’s a latin label. You know what it means in English? Yep, “itchy bottom”. So how helpful is that label? Labels, categorising sadly tend to limit our vision. Once we place something in a box we tend to stop being aware of it, stop noticing how different it is from anything else in the same box. Finally, to judge those boxes, calling some “good” and some “bad”? I can’t remember who said it, but I remember once reading “Judgement stops thought”. How true. When we judge something and especially when we judge a person, we stop thinking, stop noticing and stop actually seeing.

Nothing stays the same. We are always constantly changing. We grow, we develop, we change. The processes of discriminating, categorising and judging create a false impression that the world is made up of fixed, separate things. It’s not true. Nothing exists except embedded in a web of connections, and nothing exists without changing. The world is not really so easy to pin down, and thank goodness for that. Life is dynamic. It flows, it moves and constantly changes. Too much pinning down, labelling and judging creates a false impression of a fixed, stagnant world. So, beware. Shift your attention, break your habits and try to see the connections between things, try to see how nothing just is anything, but instead how everything is in the process of developing and changing. Everything is becoming not being…….

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