There is no spoon...

You may be old enough to cast your mind back to the late 90’s and recall the movie trilogy the matrix. When you do the title of this article will ring a bell – As Neo is taken to visit the wise and all knowing Oracle he meets a child in the waiting room. A child who has the ability to bend a spoon with his mind (something many of you may have tried with varying success after leaving the cinema). When Neo asks the child how he achieves such a feat the child simply replies ‘there is no spoon…’

 

Now at the time this line confused both Neo and I…there is no spoon? What a ridiculous statement I thought to myself. The child was clearly holding a spoon in his hand – I could see it with my own eyes. But as time has passed and I have learned more about how we process information the picture of the child holding the spoon has become clear and prominent in minds eye – the meaning now bright and vivid - something that has profoundly changed the way I think. I wonder if it will do the same thing for you…

One of the prepositions of NLP is that the map is not the territory – something that sounds strange when you first hear it roll off the tongue (or in this case leap off the page). The simplest way to understand this concept is that a map of Perth or Sydney or any other major city around the world is not the city itself. It’s a mere representation – you would agree that it is impossible for a piece of paper to embody all that the city has to offer. It may provide you with the names of the streets and where they are located but it is outside the realms of possibility for it to encompass the buildings, their textures, the smells and sounds, as well the culture of the city itself– the map is a representation or ‘generalisation’ that has been made to assist us to get around and locate things quickly.

 

Now where is this going I hear you ask as it can struggle to find the relevance of the ramblings of a seemingly mad man…The fact that you have read this far means that you are interested in finding out where this all goes and how it can help you…hang in there just a little longer I promise all will be revealed – and you may find as many others like you have that it changes the way you see, hear and feel things.

The relevance is this…we create our own maps of the world. We each code information and experiences about the past to allow us to act quickly. While you would agree that the brain has an amazing capacity to store information and analyse what’s going on - it is not possible for it do this in every single situation. Imagine having to analyse the millions of pieces of data and all of their variants every second of the day – this is not practical and your brain would explode if it needed to do this on a second by second basis. What the brain does is generalise. Think back to a time that you had an argument with a loved one. I don’t care about the content of the argument; I care about the process that you went through unconsciously. You may find under closer inspection that you were not arguing about the situation itself; you were arguing about a culmination of things. If you think back and hear yourself utter the line ‘this is just like the last time…’ or ‘you always do this…’ I challenge weather it is possible that you may have reacted to the situation based on a generalisation you had made about the way that this individual had acted in the past. Rather then analyse the entire situation in the present moment your mind quickly identified what parts were similar to a previous situation and made a decision allowing you to react in what you thought was in real time (or were it really reacting to a different moment?).

 

Lets dig a little deeper. Now these maps are individual. The movie vantage point with Matthew fox – the guy from lost - illustrates this perfectly. Each individual can see the same event but have very different perceptions of what has occurred and feel very differently about the outcome. How is this possible? Because the way that I react is based on the culmination of all the experiences that I have had over the last 27 years, experiences that I have coded to allow me to react quickly. The way that you react will be based on your experiences and how they are coded for you. To put it another way, if I were to watch the news and see a building going up in flames, I would feel bad for the family. My reaction would be completely different to someone who watches the same news piece, who may have had an experience where they had been trapped in a burning building – the sight of the billowing smoke and the crackling sound of the flames may freeze them with fear as their mind starts to relive their own experience – yet I sit there reasonable unaffected.

 

If what I am saying has not become clear or still sounds a little muddled to you…let me sum it out for you in one clear sequence of words - words that we touched on in the last entry…THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS THE TRUTH… a slight variance and maybe not as catchy as ‘there is no spoon…’ but powerful all the same. Try and resist this idea…the truth does not really exist – its something that your mind has created through generalising past experiences and reacting accordingly – it’s a fun and interesting concept that your whole life may be a lie. Are you reacting and living your life based on all of the information available? Or are you limiting choices because you are automatically reacting based on what you believed to be true?

One of the things that you’re really going to love about this idea is the way that it starts to open your mind…it really is a mind fuck when you start questioning everything that you once thought was real!

 

You can comprehend the idea that if you base your decisions on incorrect generalisations or outdated maps that you will end up lost can you not? Even Tom Tom needs his map updated once in a while.

So try this concept on for size – how does it feel when you think about applying this idea to your life and how quickly can you see the new possibilities that arise? I encourage you to go out and explore new territories and create new maps. Become aware of how you react in different situations and ask yourself why are you reacting this way? Is it an automatic reaction? Are you basing it on all of the information available to you? Are you navigating the situation using an old and out dated map. If you try it for a day, a week, a month or year you may find it changes how you live. The beautiful thing is that if you try it and don’t like it you can simply throw it away. One thing I do know is that the old maps will still be there to fall back on if you need them.  

So this blog was a little longer than intended but think it needed to be to illustrate the idea properly - most of them will be considerably shorter than this. Next time I will get to the odd sounding name I promise.

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Until we meet again.

-Dan-