Tag Archives: cognitive dissonance

square one

5 Jul

square_one_by_macen

There is strength, I know, in allowing life to strip me. I am getting more comfortable with the process.

Our world thinks it is game board full of squares.  In this dreaming:  whoever gets to the farthest square of gain is winning.  The one – as in ME 🙂 – who starts on square one everyday – who forgets her gender, her age, her family, her status, every night at bedtime, and reconstructs herself in the shower enough to begin again at square one – is blessed!

The board is changing itself daily too – so square one is never the same square.

alice board

Putting on the outfit of identity everyday helps me remember that I can chose something different and new at each moment.  Life is a continual Groundhog Day. I am  an acerbic jerk one day, and an accomplished lover of all that is the next.  I love the jerk because she was trying her best, doing all she knew, and she offers a great yardstick measure of change and possibility.

And now I find I am tired of all my words and posturing.  What is true is that I feel disoriented often to find myself in a super consistent dream of life in this single identity. I love the activities that make me forget who I am – such relief.  Whoosh, back into a body, surprise.  Alice down the rabbit hole.

I once had a neighbor who was getting close to 70 years old, a funny, unguarded story-teller who would stop to chat and spin her tales without a glance at her watch.  She told me that she often forgot her age and when she saw the young mothers on the playground, she felt she was a peer and had to stop herself from entering the gate – “I feel the very same as I have my whole life; I’m surprised when I remember I’m a grandma.”  She is closer to what I am trying to say.  We think we are a fixed thing – but our life shows us the nature of change and the ride is just a smallish experience – a short trip in a conglomeration of journeys, and sometimes the world goes wonky when you sense that deep in your bones.  Have a biscuit and a bit of tea and settle yourself, girl.  You forget. You remember.  You live a life in the flash of a lightning strike – and you sit numb and frozen in place for the strangeness that is never acknowledged while we talk about all the rain.

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Following the Trail of Cognitive Dissonance

1 Mar

Forgive my anecdotes, please.  I teach composition.  I tell my student that telling stories helps others to connect to their writing, to feel what they are saying. But I always hesitate to tell a story because I bask in emptiness at times; I love stepping away from stories of me, and wonder if fishing out memories is only adding to the “Story of Self.”

Stories to tell/no stories to tell, a polarity and a paradox.

These paradoxes present themselves all day long if we are awake and seeing.  The world is full of nothing but paradox.  An empty vessel is a worthless person/an empty vessel is enlightened.  I know I know nothing.  We learn from history that we do not learn from History. 🙂  These paradoxes are the whispers of spirit, the pull to zoom out beyond the duality.  The field that Rumi talks about calls to us.

“Out beyond ideas of right doing and wrong doing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”

― Rumi

The first call to look beyond is the discomfort we feel with Cognitive Dissonance, holding two contrary ideas at once that contradict.  This feeling of discomfort can at first make you want to take a comfort pill and go back to bed.  But if we are brave, Cognitive Dissonance invites growth beyond duality.

So here is a story of a bit of cognitive dissonance in my path a while ago.

I didn’t have access to computers or the internet right off because I was busy with my kids.  There was a marked time when all of the sudden, I was exposed to the myriad of information out there.

So right as this transition was occurring, I hastily printed out some information for my daughter whose teacher had requested she come in with some information about the Mayans.

She goes off to school and the page stayed opened on the computer and we all know how one peek leads to another to another, and suddenly I am down one of  my first rabbit holes.

I stumbled upon an Ian Lungold lecture about the Mayan Calander, 4 hours long.  I fell in.  It was rather academic for 3 hours plus, discussing the Mayan concept of time in contrast to the Gregorian Calendar and the Western measure of time.  I sat bolt upright when he suddenly began talking about aliens.   Aliens?  I sat her for 3 hours to listen to someone who was leading up to Aliens?   I was so disgusted with myself because this topic suddenly seemed so bizarre, outrageous, and unverifiable that I felt low and cheap for having wasted my time.  I had cognitive dissonance, and tried to shut it down by disregarding the entirety of the information.

But I could not dismiss how intelligent and lucid the 3 hours had been up until that point.  I couldn’t flush it all away.

Needless to say, I then spent years falling down many rabbit holes, learning to read, watch, and observe with a certain distance and an openness all at the same time – continuing with what seemed to interest and respectfully leaving what seemed out of line.

One of the voices that spoke to the process of this unfolding through so many avenues was Neil Kramer.

Here is an amazing presentation that offers up some of his teachings with visual and graphic representations so rich and illuminating, the  40 minutes gives one much in the exchange.

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Merging

27 Nov

Eden is in a play. Good. But also, this means lots of rehearsals and late night pick ups. My days do start at 5:15, but even without that early start, I’m not a good late night girl – never have been.

So yesterday, after waiting for her text to come get her, after trying to keep myself awake enough to drive downtown to pick her up, after bundling up for the drop in temperature, I was vaguely feeling put out: tired, oblivious, chilled.

Crossing the bridge from James Island to downtown, listening to Terry Gross on Fresh Air interviewing someone about food and cooking, I passed a woman walking the 2 mile bridge alone in the cold and in the dark.

Where is this lady going? Is she safe by all the rushing cars? How must that breeze feel across the marsh and water as she trudges along?

Some days I think I struggle but…

I am in my warm car; my car works; I have enough money for the week, the month, the next foreseeable future. I have a beautiful actress waiting on me, depending on me. We have food; we have the freedom to enjoy whatever we can imagine…

Yeah, yeah, yeah… I just gave you the feel-good, junk food, Hallmark card of gratitude.

What I really want to say is that in that moment, when I see the lady crossing the bridge, in the dark, in the cold, alone, I become her. I do. I walk in those feet. Identity is so slippery, I feel like I have to be careful at the stoplights for I slip into every person behind the wheel of every car that goes by.

When Chloe was one, through strange circumstances, I found myself strolling through the red light district of Amsterdam with a baby strapped on my back. I was glancing about and suddenly locked eyes with a woman dancing in a window: Me dressed in such a costume of motherhood and her a woman almost naked trying hard to lure men inside in the afternoon, glaring sun. Such outward contrast, yet she and I both knew in that moment that we were one and the same. I was in the window, and she was walking along with a baby.

Through merging in this way came a “knowing” of how transportable, transient and transcendent we truly are! Don’t let the costumes fool you!

 

 

Addendum:

My friend sent me this clip, which came into her mind from this post.  Now I get to be Marlee Matlin too!  🙂

Scene from Bleep

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Paradox

20 Nov

Image

Paradox

Where we reside, the lessons come through opposites. I have a friend (DK) who has shown me that where paradox resides, you can be sure the divine is shining through. The divine is urging us on toward growth!

In writing a bit in this blog, I find myself face to face once again with the opposites within me. Even if no one reads this, and the format is just a way of reflecting me back to me, I question the impulse! Why share these thoughts? Is it ego? Why put these ponderings out in any sort of public way?

Now for the flip: connecting cannot take place without some sort of impulse. The past few years, the universe has richly rewarded me for stepping out of comfortable spots when the impulse to share strikes – my only contacts with awakening friends have come about by some movement, some acting on the impulse to share. My yin hunkers down and isolates to know herself, my yang seeks the company of like minded friends. My sun: My moon.

When our brains are forced to wrap around seemingly opposite ideas, and hold them all as true, we are thrown into cognitive dissonance.  We, human animals, do not like cognitive dissonance.  Cog Dis (so familiar to me now that the concept has this nickname) feels uncomfortable. In our discomfort, we have a choice to make. We can crack the outer shell of what we “think” we know and GROW. Or we can hide and revert back into old easy patterns – pretending we never heard the information that made our head hurt.  Then often we shoot the uncomfortable thought full of  hatred, fear and spew. Think Matrix movie moment…


There is lots of Cog Dis to be had, these days. On some level, we all know…the latest news stories…the lie repeated so often it becomes fact; so many broken systems surround us everyday. Peak Oil was one of the first such paradoxes that cracked my shell at one point – many shells ago. Our world on the verge of collapse in so many areas, one needn’t travel far to find the angst-ridden discord of opposites pulling.

Today I ask myself, what is asking to be looked at right now, full on? In what area am I choosing the steak?

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