Do you see one or both?

What do you see when you first look at this picture?  A young woman?  An old woman perhaps?

Most of us immediately see one or the other.  But when someone informs us that there is another way of looking at the picture, we attune our minds to finding the other view and usually then see the other woman that at first we did not see.  Once you are able to see both the young and the old woman, your view of this picture has been forever changed and there is (hopefully) no going back to seeing only the original view which you saw.

I've been thinking lately about how education is like this analogy, how once you learn a bit of information, if you really grasp it, your mind is enlarged and your outlook is adjusted to compensate for the new information.  Additionally, what happens when you learn information that conflicts so entirely with your original view that it seems the old and the new cannot simultaneously exist in your world, and you then must choose between the two views?  Partially what has made me think about this concept is my recent training as a rape crisis counselor.  We have listened to many various speakers, all coming from differing angles on the same topic:  counselors of the perpetrators, counselors of the victims, law enforcement, lawyers who prosecute these types of crimes, professors of rape psychology, etc.  All of this information has been transformative; I cannot go back to some of my previous misinformed and uniformed ways of thinking.  It has opened my mind to a victim's world that I never really thought much about because I didn't have to.  It has enlarged my thinking in terms of rape myths about the victim and the perpetrator, and how society supports this type of behavior by encouraging damaging stereotypes of men and women.  Being able to see one perspective, the one that naturally comes to us based on our life experiences, is habitual, but being able to see different perspectives regardless of our life experiences is far better, and is in fact what empathy is.

There seems to be a bit of psychology to learning as well.  It is an interesting phenomena when for whatever reason, people refuse to see or don't even want to know if there is more to the picture.  Because it is sometimes uncomfortable to have our thinking challenged, we may even be defensive when we are confronted with information that may change our view or we may resist having to exert the energy to rebalance our old views with the new information.  I have experienced this lately as I have had to employ much effort in changing thinking patterns that I felt were detrimental to my emotional health.  Definitely, it would have been much easier initially to continue banging my head up against the wall wondering why the same behavior patterns weren't resulting in different outcomes, but instead I decided it was worth the effort to forge new and better emotional thinking strategies.  Being conscious of my thoughts on a daily basis, only allowing ones in that would aid my change process, and refusing to let the previous thoughts take seed in my mind, often felt like my mind was training for a marathon.  This process made me cognizant of the tremendous power the mind has to shape our world, but how we usually live our lives in reflex, not fully taking control of all our minds are capable of.  I recently heard this quote in regard to exercise:  “Get comfortable with being uncomfortable!”  I chose to extrapolate meaning to other areas in my life besides exercise.  Learning and seeing the world outside our own is uncomfortable because it can change us forever, but what helps is how we choose to assimilate that new information into our life.  I remember Robert relating a story of an authority figure who came to speak to the missionaries in his area of Cape Verde, Africa while on his mission.  The authority person pointed at the abject poverty on the island and commented that it was "okay" for that to happen because "they were just here to receive bodies."  So instead of widening his mind, allowing the discomfort of human suffering to penetrate into his world view and react with compassion, determining what he could personally do to stop the starvation and suffering, he chose to rationalize it and reduce it.  His other choice could have been to teach the young men serving there to reach out with humility and compassion, with an acknowledgment that all people are worthy of equal consideration and to remember the suffering, so that someday they could perhaps choose to make a difference in other ways besides teaching them the gospel.  We should allow ourselves to feel the discomfort of learning new things that cause our minds to cramp a bit as we consider for a while in what ways we will authorize the new found information to change us.  And then, like physical muscles that grow in response to added strain, our minds, hearts, and spirits are enabled to grow and become stronger.

The real value of our learning is not only in the facts and ideas we have stored away in our memory – it is the knowledge of how to learn, the pattern of thinking and processing that strenuous learning requires. One of my favorite religious intellects notes that it is possible to think too much, but we can never think too well.  An athlete or a dancer, through the repetition of a specific series of movements, will develop a muscle memory, allowing them to make those same movements with greater ease and grace; likewise, serious thinkers develop an intellectual muscle memory, allowing them to process information and ideas with greater ease and dexterity.  But it can atrophy through a lack of use, as an athlete’s muscle can lose its strength.  Socrates famously said that the unexamined life is not worth living. Without that examination of our own lives and their accompanying biases, opinions, views, and experiences, we fall into patterns of behavior that have no meaning — we accept our own nature as inexplicable.

As we learn about ourselves in the wide world, the intellectual skills and instincts we develop serve us well, as long as we have open eyes, open ears and an open mind attempting to see the complexities of life.  But we are also well served by having an open heart, not being afraid to feel.  The strong feelings we have – love, fear, compassion, anger – will help us find truth.  There is much to be learned from the shiver up the spine while listening to music or the innate sense of unfairness when confronted with oppression.  Intellect and emotion need balance – neither should dominate the other.  And the same is true for those who look to spirituality for answers.  It is not easy to balance between the brain, the heart and the spirit – it needs effort and practice – but we need not see them opposing each other, but rather complementing each other.