[From Bill Powers (960218.0300 MST)]
I seem to have begun sleeping like a cat -- naps.
First light in the new observatory yesterday evening, although the side-
walls and roof aren't up yet. The dead-reckoning polar alignment was
within 2 degrees; Polaris was in the finder field. Ten minutes of
adjustment of the universe relative to the telescope brought Polaris to
center. People who steer by the North Star should now find their
navigation much more accurate.
···
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Bill Leach 960217.20:37 U.S. Eastern Time Zone --
This post was full of insight and wisdom. There is nothing depressed
about your ability to use PCT to convey an understanding of human
experience. Perhaps the problem is that your grasp of PCT has rendered
all other occupations irrelevant. I suggest that you set yourself up as
a PCT consultant and start applying it to people's problems. Why not?
Your answers would make at least as much sense as what other consultants
say.
The odd thing about your post is that I woke up thinking almost exactly
the same things you were saying to Remi Cote, but nothing as well-
organized.
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Once in a while I'm able to stand back from the detailed arguments on
the net and see something obvious about them. The basic problem that I
see now is that people always -- ALWAYS -- want to argue with me about
some implication of PCT when they should be arguing with themselves.
They are using me (and others who argue like me) as an external
representative of a problem inside themselves.
I address here a generic "you" -- to whom it may concern.
When you understand the idea that behavior is the process by which all
organisms -- even you, whoever you are -- control their experiences of
the world and themselves, you immediately find that this idea conflicts
with much of what you have learned and believed. Since you HAVE learned
and DO believe these other ideas, you begin to defend them against your
own understanding of PCT. If this understanding of PCT had not come from
outside, however, you would have nobody to argue with but yourself. You
would be faced with two (at least two) contradictory conceptions of
human nature and human behavior, and you would have to work out a
resolution alone.
However, since there are people like me around who use the PCT concept
rather than any other, this internal conflict can be turned outward and
made into an argument with someone else. Doing this makes the resolution
of the conflict impossible, since in effect you are turning the
responsibility for the PCT argument over to someone else, which allows
you to devote your energies to defending your old beliefs and knowledge.
"But what about this?" you say, and "what about that?" In asking such
questions, you're really expressing the nature of your own conflict, but
making it seem to yourself that you have an argument with someone else.
There IS a conflict between the PCT answers to this and that and the
answers you have learned and believe. The more clearly you grasp the
basic principle of PCT, the sharper the conflict becomes. The only way
out of this conflict is to take responsibility for both sides of it, and
make a decision as to which side you're going to take. Nobody else can
help with this, except perhaps by making sure the PCT concept is clearly
expressed. Nobody else can make up your mind for you.
Every now and then during the past six years, individuals on the net
have described their PCT "epiphany," a moment when they suddenly
understood some crucial aspect of the PCT concept. This was clearly a
moment when some major conflict with an old idea was resolved. Such
ephiphanies don't happen as a result of being convinced by someone else.
They happen when you're by yourself, wrestling with yourself, pitting
some old understanding, and maybe many of them, against this new one. An
internal crisis occurs and then it is suddenly plain which way you have
to go. The dam breaks and a flood of new understandings appears, with
many familiar ideas suddenly taking on a new appearance. All of this
happens in solitude, in a closed room where there is nobody to confront
but yourself.
Most of you writing on this net have participated in arguments against
some aspect of PCT. But more important, most of you have witnessed
_others_ engaging in such arguments, others who are not defending the
truths you are defending, but some other truth that you most likely
don't accept for yourself. After seeing so many others arguing against
some PCT idea on grounds that are, to you, irrelevant or even mistaken,
it must surely have occurred to you that you might be doing something
similar. Surely it must have struck you as odd that PCT can be
considered wrong in so many different ways, but only in one particular
way that bears on your own ideas. Haven't you ever wondered how it can
be that your own particular concerns are the only ones where PCT fails
to take precedence, while it is clear that the concerns of others who
believe in other things are all misguided and should give way to PCT?
Most of you on this List have been here for years, many for five years
or more. Why? What is it that keeps you tuned in? I ask particularly
those people who are still dithering, who haven't really decided that
the PCT view is correct, who are waiting for some magical event that
will make everything clear. Even more to the point, I ask this of people
who are well-entrenched in other points of view, who still think there
are other approaches to human nature that have merit, that are worth
continued effort, that contain some germ of truth that is an exception
to PCT. What are you waiting for, looking for? Some ultimate vindication
of your old beliefs? Some external resolution of the conflict? Is PCT
just a threat that you have to keep track of? Or is this just another
soap opera, in which you are involved only out of habit? Are the
arguments interesting just for the sake of seeing who is scoring the
most points, like a sporting event?
I don't know what I'm leading up to here. Perhaps I'm just explaining to
myself that arguments are futile, and that the only useful way to
communicate PCT is to focus on the basic principle and tell people to
work out the conflicts with older ideas for themselves. At least for the
moment, in the middle of this night, that seems like an excellent idea.
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Best,
Bill P.