What Are You Willing to See?

It is said that “seeing is believing” but, in fact, it is from believing that we see.

I read an intriguing case last night involving scientist Raymond Dart, who discovered and named a distinct species of early human. He later excavated a cave with what he believed to be the “kitchen remains” of this early species, where he described large animal remains, skulls minus skeletons, and human bones crushed in what looked to be a cannibal feast, alongside crude weapons like clubs and knives fashioned from antelope horns. This led to two decades of research and publishing, and his point of view that human emerged from ape because humans are killers, and that human history has been one of weapons development.

Another twenty years later another scientist, Charles Kimberlin Brain, working with the same site and same bones, showed that the remains – how they were crushed, what was left, and other markings – followed not a cannibalistic pattern, but a carnivorous one, specifically the way large cats, like lions, kill, hide, and eat their food. What Dart thought were early weapons made from horns were just what wild cats leave behind after eating.

So who’s right?

The psychological phenomenon of perceptual bias has been well documented, from the Gestalt Principles of Perceptual Organization that show that ‘in our minds’ we fill in the lines for half-drawn shapes to see entire circles and squares, to Tolman’s work on rats that show that fear-based environments limit the number of possible paths rats are able to see in mazes, to contemporary media studies that show that men in groups composed of 17 percent women believe it to be 50% women and that groups of only 33% women were perceived by men to be “majority women”. And all of this is just science’s fancy, researched way of saying: We create our own realities.

In the case of scientist Raymond Dart, it’s possible that experience focused and biased his particular blood-thirsty human instinct point of view – that’s the opinion of author Bruce Chatwin, who wrote about it. As Chatwin found, Dart was a WWI generation child. Did he witness a violent perspective of humans that then biased many of his later conclusions? We can’t say for sure, but we can learn something from thinking about it.

Lately I’ve been reading a lot of American and European newspapers in researching an article. Many of the articles focus on violence, division, distrust, anger, and so on, whether reporting on terrorism, shootings, or simply in dialogue with Clinton or Trump. Even in banal reportage of Clinton’s campaign progress, for example, words like “assailed by critics”, “barraged with questions”, and “undercut her comments” keep these violent metaphors and concepts top of mind.

One day, buried below the fold (meaning I had to scroll down to find it), was an article about the US House of Democrats conducting a peaceful sit-in asking for improved gun-laws. A couple of weeks earlier, not carried by major papers but showing up only on a website devoted to weather, was an article that the Ozone layer is improving (which, it turns out, was 2 years-old ‘news’). For me these are the most ground-breaking news of the summer, if not the year! For the public, or at least the newspapers who follow public thirst, they didn’t merit top billing or even publication at all.

Have we, as a greater community, biased ourselves to only believe the negative, so much so that when solutions arrive we not only can’t see them, we don’t count them as important?

Creating our own realities is another way of dreaming ourselves into being. We do this on a communal as well as individual basis. And we either do it subconsciously or consciously. If subconscious we will have repetitive nightmares; if we wake up, we can come to a place of transformation. Approaching the dream consciously and in response becomes the cure.

So what does that mean? It means that right now there is a bias toward perceiving the world as aggressive, divided, and in decline (environmentally, economically, socially, etc.). This bias chooses what topics we spend our time on when chatting with friends, what we look for when we go online, and the language and metaphors we use to describe things. The phrases in the Clinton article above are one example, but think about your daily descriptions: “I’m going to attack this next project”; “I killed that report!”; “he nailed it”. Think of how often we talk about “going back” to times that were supposedly better, e.g. before the decline.

What would happen if we chose to start looking forward? If we began to look for solutions instead of repeating the repetitive nightmare of aggression and division? If we focused instead on what positives are happening in the world, and spent time adding our talents to growing the “health” rather than sitting on our hands and adding to the disease? Great Dreaming has always been about visioning. In the Jewish tradition great dreams are followed by great shifts, of people, families, and even cultures moving into new chapters. It is the antidote to perceptual bias.

With Great Dreams we are jolted into seeing things from a different perspective. Instead of staying in the current debate – for example, is paper better than plastic, are electric cars better than diesel – we can plunge to the deeper question of “do we need so many things”, and even deeper to ask “what dis-ease (as in discomfort) are all these things attempt to fill in us”? Seeing things from a different perspective, finding the true question, then allows us to find creative responses. Often, these creative responses are under our very noses, side by side with the negatives we spend so much time paying attention to. If we learn to work with our dreams as individuals, then we learn how to see patterns and to see these creative responses. This then shows us how to apply this means of transformation to the big communal dream – to see what nightmare our culture is dreaming, what is repeating, to define the necessity, and to find the response. It’s the way of leaping into a new future, instead of incrementalizing ourselves inch by inch by hanging on to stale notions.

My challenge to the world is to return to a relationship with your dreams. To become again the visionaries that can move our world out of these stuck biases and into a world that, deep down inside, we all yearn for. To learn to see the dream ‘out there’ as something that is born from biases we carry ‘in here’ and to learn to leap out of it, to respond and transform.

It all starts with a dream – if you haven’t worked with your dreams then take a look at classes available on my site. There is a dream group class offered every semester, and a pop-up class in the summers. I make sure to make dream group classes available all the time because in my experience there is no tool more powerful in this world for self and communal transformation than learning to use our dreams consciously.

As you dream, ask yourself: What am I willing to see? Perhaps today you will see something different.