Transformations

“It is the very flexibility of relationships that makes it possible to transform unpleasant interactions into tolerable, even exciting ones. How we define and interpret a social situation makes a great difference to how people will treat one another, and to how they will feel while doing it. For instance, when our son, Mark was twelve years old, he took a shortcut across a rather deserted park one afternoon as he walked form school. In the middle of the park he was suddenly confronted by 3 large young men from the neighboring ghetto. “Don’t make a move or he will shoot you,” one of them said, nodding towards the third man, who had his hand in the pocket. The 3 took away everything Mark had- some change and a worn Timex. “Now keep on going. Don’t run, don’t even turn around.”


So Mark started walking again toward home, and the 3 went in other direction. After a few steps, however , Mark turned around and tried to catch up with them. “Listen,” he called, “I wanted to talk to you .” “Keep going”, they shouted back. But he caught up with the trip, and asked if they would reconsider giving him back the watch they had taken. He explained that it was very cheap, and ho possible value to anyone except him: “ You see, it was given to me on my birthday by my parents.” The 3 were furious, but finally decided to take a vote on whether to give the watch back. The vote went 2 to 1 in favor of retuning it, so Mark walked proudly home without change but with the old watch. Of course it took his parent a lot longer to recover from the experience.

From an adult perspective, Mark was foolish to possibly risk his life for an old watch, no matter how sentimentally valued it was. But this episode illustrates an important general point: that a social situation has the potential to be transformed by redefining its rules. By not taking on the role of the “victim” that had been imposed on him, and by not treating his assailants as “robbers”, but as reasonable people who might be expected to empthasize with a son’s attachment to a family keepsake, Mark was able to change the encounter from a hold up to one that involved, at least to some degree, a rational democratic decision. In this case he was largely dependent on luck: the robbers could have been drunk. But the point is still valid: human relations are malleable, and if a person has the appropriate skills their rules can be transformed.”

- From the pages of “Flow - The Psychology of Optimal Experience”.

One’s own experience is the best arbitrator. During 1998, I had a once- in- lifetime opportunity to live in a dilapidated condominium near a ghetto in West Haven, when I was working as programmer in USA. The money we used to save most diligently by living in that part of the town was quite often shared with the needy big built black boys quite often. During one cold and snowy Winter night, as I returned home from the movie “Wag the Dog “ ( Robert DeNiro & Dustin Hoff man classic) and stepped out of my car near the apartment, I got mugged by a teenaged Black boy. Even though he surely appeared to be in early teens, he was a tall Dennis Rodman ( Chicago Bulls !) look alike and I did not have any qualms in being an highly intelligent and wise Desi, in handing over my purse most dutifully. As he took 10 – 20 Dollars I had kept in my purse, he looked at the family photo I had kept in the purse , and then taking pity on me threw the purse into the snow and walked away. While searching for my purse in that cold inhospitable night, I did have mixed feelings about the whole episode. Later, whenever I attended a personal development program like NLP, as the instructor asked us to relive one of the unpleasant episode in my life, as part of mental exercises, almost always this incident used to pop up in mind. Some 12 years later, I had the same exasperated feeling, as my builder was haggling for more money most unfairly, holding the registration and handing over of my apartment. When I told them that the black boy who had mugged me had more ethics and values than them, I could see the hurt feeling in their VP – Sales’s face and I did manage to register and get my apartment without opening my purse or letting down myself. Subsequently, even though my antagonism towards the builder continued in abundance, I did have a healthy relationship with this Sr. Executive, whom I thought was quite reasonable and total misfit (as for the value system) working in construction industry. Incidentally he quit them last month.

Human perceptions, relationships and social situations are quite malleable and we do have the power to transform them. IMHV, more than the skills, undying passion for not letting oneself down, attitude of not pitying oneself and inner strength for being “Wholly Integrated & Feeling secured ” are the catalysts and reactants of such transformations.

Freedom from Conditioning or Free- Doom ?

“One morning an irrestible force propelled MIT Professor Marvin Minsky to one corner of his class room and pinned him there as securely as a butterfly impaled in a museum showcase. It was force of habit – a brand new habit imposed upon him on the spot by a group of playfully experimental students. The boys had him at their mercy, as if he was a robot slave and they the masters at the controls.


They ‘robotized’ Minsky with a psychological ruse much like the methods for teaching rats to run through a maze, or training a dog to fetch a newspaper. Soon after the class began, a few students started manipulating him. Whenever he paced to the right, they whispered softly to each other, rustled papers, dropped pencils, and created other minor distractions. But when he happened to take a few steps to the left, they sat up and paid close attention to the lecture. In short they conditioned Minsky by repeatedly punishing him for moving in one direction and rewarding him for moving in the opposite direction. Within half an hour he stopped pacing altogether and stood like a cigar store Indian near the left hand edge of the black board. So subtly had he been habituated that he did not realize an experiment was in progress, and that he was the guinea pig - ironically , since Minsky is a leading authority on the theory of automations.” (Think, November – December 1969).

By all accounts, Minsky is not one of those ordinary Steve and Charlie. Minsky is listed on Google Directory as one of the all time top six people in the field of AI. Isaac Asimov described Minsky as one of only two people he would admit were more intelligent than himself, the other being Carl Sagan. Patrick Winston has also described Minsky as the smartest person he has ever met. That is some CV, I should say.

Now the pertinent question to ask is where does that leave us? I.e. You and me? When someone like the caliber of Minsky was so easily susceptible to environmental conditioning? How free we are? “Free Will”, “Clear thinking” , “ Seeing it as it is”, “Objectivity” - Are these just yearning s of a mind which is a prisoner of Conditioning. Some of it inherited. By Nature. And some of it acquired thru Nurture.

Are n’t we living the lives of Somnolence, as programmed characters in a Shakespearian drama. Conditioned to see what we want to see, hear what we want to hear and feel what we want to feel.

Perhaps we fail to understand that these conditionings act as Filters between us and the “Real world out there”.

In all reality, it is in our arrogance, we added one of the many meaning of the word Twist “to alter or distort the intended meaning of”.. It suggests that human beings do that only intentionally and deliberately. All other times they seem to claim as they get the Meaning as it is! As one of the best examples of cultural conditioning, it still holds out against some 2500 years of “Experiential Wisdom” of one Sidhartha Gautama who suggested it all starts with having “Right View”. The “Meaning of Meaning” proposed by I.A. Richards, which literally suggested that meaning resides in people and not in Words. It all boils down to same. We create our own Worlds in our Brain, which could be an absolutely distorted version of the real World out there. The realization that our own conditioning and filters Twist (the way I see that) and distort reality may be the sign post at the fork between freedom and free-doom.