watch tHe skies

I’ve done a lot of study in my time, and figured that I had a pretty good grip on the world, how it works, and what is behind the curtain. However, when I started studying NLP, my grip on the world turned out to be a grip on my perception of the world, which is a very different thing indeed.

What on earth does that mean (pardon the pun)? Ok, so one of the presuppositions of NLP is that “the map is not the territory”. My understanding of that is that people don’t experience reality directly. Sure, they see what they see, hear what they hear, and smells, sensations and tastes are all linked to reality. However, raw data from “reality” is filtered by your mind even before it hits the senses - remember, you don’t look at everything, you choose to look at certain things. And even the data you do choose to take in is filtered by many aspects - your view of life (are you a glass half full or empty person), your experience and how you’ve coded that, your beliefs and much much more. Effectively you receive and filter information which becomes your map of reality.

By map I mean this - is the London Tube Map ACTUALLY London? No it’s a representation of part of it, the parts of London that are useful for the purpose of navigating the underground. Is the Atlas ACTUALLY the world? No it’s just a map of the real thing. It doesn’t have every single rock and building on it, just the information useful for understanding the geography of the planet. Your map is a representation of reality created and maintained by you for the purpose of navigating life. It will always have parts missing… a child doesn’t have its map coded that fire hurts until it burns itself and very quickly modifies its map.

So although you are interacting with reality every day, you don’t experience it, and haven’t done, ever. You could argue that a baby doesn’t have any of those filters, and perhaps you are right, but perhaps you need to consider when a baby can possibly have NO filters at all? At birth? Before birth? Are they genetically coded? That’s a whole new discussion.

So what does this mean? Well one way of looking at it is that perhaps all of those things that you thought are true aren’t necessarily true. On finding out that his father was in fact Darth Vader, Luke complained to the spectral Obi Wan, who told him that what he had said was the truth “from a certain point of view”. And perhaps this is a way of seeing what the truth is… our “maps of reality” are all from certain points of view, and even if we dedicated our lives to seeing reality from every point of view, the map still wouldn’t be complete because we would have to interact with everyone and everything in the universe.

So the fact that your map of reality is incomplete means that everyone you meet and everything you do has the potential to enrich your map and give you new perspectives. This, for me, changed my view of other people, particularly those that I didn’t agree with. I went from thinking “he doesn’t know what he’s talking about” to “I wonder what must be true for him to think that”, and at that moment I immediately started to learn more from every person I met, every TV show I watched and every walk I took. For me, accepting that my view is just that, a perspective on reality shifted my attitude to what it meant to experience reality.

Of course everything I’ve written is my interpretation of my map, right at this moment, and not necessarily true, but perhaps an interesting perspective?

I was browsing this morning and found this excellent site run by Joanna Young, an Edinburgh-based Life Coach. She’s posted a great article on enriching your map, well worth a read, and it inspired me to write this.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 5th, 2007 at 9:07 am and is filed under nlp & hypnosis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.