Mindfulness by Mark Williams

Mindfulness by Mark Williams

Author:Mark Williams [Williams, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780748131419
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2011-05-04T23:00:00+00:00


CHAPTER EIGHT

Mindfulness Week Four:

Moving Beyond the

Rumour Mill

John was on his way to school.

He was worried about the maths lesson.

He was not sure he could control the class again today.

It was not part of a janitor’s duty.1

What did you notice when you read these sentences? Most people find that they repeatedly update their view of the scene in their mind’s eye. First of all, they see a little boy winding his way to school and worrying about his maths lesson. Then they’re forced to update the scene as the little boy changes into a teacher, before finally morphing into a janitor.

This example illustrates how the mind is continuously working ‘behind the scenes’ to build a picture of the world as best it can. We never see a scene in photographic detail, but instead make inferences based on the ‘facts’ that we are given. The mind elaborates on the details, judging them, fitting them with past experience, anticipating how they’ll be in the future and attaching meaning to them. It’s a fantastically elaborate mental juggling act. And this whole process is run and rerun every time we read a magazine, recall a memory, engage in conversation or anticipate the future. As a result, events seen in the mind’s eye can end up differing wildly from person to person and from any objective ‘reality’: we don’t see the world as it is, but as we are.

We are constantly making guesses about the world – and we’re barely conscious of it. We only notice it when someone comes along and plays a trick on us, as in the John scenario. Then our running commentary on life is laid bare and evaporates – before reformulating itself seamlessly into a new one. Often we’re not even aware of the shift. Or, if we are, it gives us a little shiver of vertigo, as if the world imperceptibly shifted beneath our feet. And, if you’re lucky, it will make you laugh out loud – this sudden shifting of perspective is how many jokes work.

The way we interpret the world makes a huge difference to how we react. This is sometimes called the ABC model of emotions. The ‘A’ represents the situation itself – what a video camera would record. The ‘B’ is the interpretation given to the scene; the running story we create out of the situation, which often flows just beneath the surface of awareness but is taken as fact. The ‘C’ is our reactions: our emotions, body sensations and our impulses to act in various ways.

Often, we see the ‘A’ and ‘C’ quite clearly, but we are not aware of the ‘B’. We think that the situation itself aroused our feelings and emotions when, in fact, it was our interpretation of the scene that did this. It’s as if the world were a silent film on which we write our own commentary. But the commentary, with its explanations of what is going on, happens so fast that we take it to be part of the film.



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