eThoughts : The Art of Decentration

Part of the series It’s All Been Said Before™ (© 2006), a division of Book-In-A-Drawer Publications.™

I was watching a movie recently and realized that the dialogue was supposed to be a kind of “European” versus “Native American” pattern of thinking. For me it raised some interesting questions—like who is seeing reality correctly, or are both views correct?

From my perspective, the writers were presenting the “European” standard of thought as concept driven, as in categories, hierarchies, verbal communication, and attention to mental processes. The “Native American” pattern of thinking was presented as attention to energies, as in physical, mental, and spiritual energies, non-verbal communication, and attunement of the internal to the external.

Seemed simple enough—white people are conniving, using language and action to deceive and create a world to match their minds, natives are measuring congruence between thoughts, non-thoughts, existence, and matching their beings to the world as it is. Despite those overall differences, there were still characters in the movie that represented wiser white people and fallen natives—which meant that the good whites were more native and the bad natives were more white.

Well, it’s a Hollywood movie and as a friend of mine recently said, if one wants to be a successful writer, there’s got to be blood on the table. My puzzlement about the presentation was the assumption of what constituted “right” thinking. I’m onboard with attunement to energies, but that might mean that there are energies that are not attuned with our own. Duh. And that lack of attunement may be more of an invitation to become more attuned, rather than to become more suspicious and to force others to fight or assimilate.

Here’s the deal as I see it: There are many people, most I dare say, that read the world and others for what it and they can provide—as in where am I compared to others and what’s in it for me? Placement and provision thinking is only one kind of energy reading, another is reading energy for what it is, not for what it can provide. But if the standard is directed towards reading energy for what it can provide—what’s in it for me?—the world becomes narrower and slipperier. If the standard is reading energy for what one can see, the world becomes clearer, which includes the what’s-in-it-for-me read.

The problem? How do we see without doing so through our eyes? The solution, look without our eyes. It’s a problem of decentration. Solutions to problems tend to have more than one variable. When we see only one variable in one way, we are centrating on one facet of the problem and we’ll likely come up with a narrow solution. When we stop that centration, our world expands without losing ourselves.

Hey, how about that!