We’ve All Been Hoodwinked!
‘Hoodwinked’ is the title of my forthcoming book. The dictionary defines hoodwinked as “To deceive or trick; to blindfold.” Why do I use that word as the title?
The world we shape as creative beings seems to grow increasingly large, complex, and unwieldy. Each layer of our technological progress solves problems of the past, at least to some degree, though all too frequently we discover that we have created new difficulties in the process.
For example, it is almost universally agreed that our greatly increased life expectancy is a good thing, but then we have to deal with overcrowding, increasing competition for dwindling resources, and so on.
This example shows us the truth of Einstein’s statement that we can’t solve problems with the same thinking that created them in the first place. If that’s true, we might want to know why that is, and what “the same thinking” means.
One way to think about this is to notice that we humans consistently overlook the difference between reality, on the one hand, and our stories about and interpretations of reality on the other. Those two things, experience and description of experience, are fundamentally different.
Our reality lives in our experience.
And our experience takes place exclusively in the present moment.
Our stories about our experience, however, are pictures of the past. We humans live almost exclusively in the past. Listen to almost any conversation, and you will hear story-matching and often story-competition.
Story-matching sounds like, “Yeah, I did that too!” Story-competition sounds like, “You did that? Well, I did this!” I hear your story and I raise you one.
And where do those stories live?
Our stories live in memories of the past, multi-sensory records of past experiences and past observations.
If you’re like me, we take pictures of the cool things we see and do. We take these pictures both with our cameras/phones and with our memories. Any new experience we have instantly draws our attention to “earlier-similars.” “Earlier-similars” are memories to which the experiences we just had are compared. The mind is comfortable with that domain, but it’s not the same as being in the present, in our experience here and now. What does this all amount to?
We’ve traded our present experience, our reality, for our stories of the past.
We’ve learned how to tell these stories so that they make us feel better in the telling. We’ve been deceived into thinking that by telling our stories to ourselves and each other, we can somehow rearrange the circumstances of our lives so that we feel better. And in the process, we’ve given away our power to determine the quality of our own lives, to control the way we feel, because all of our power lies in the present moment. And the “story-boarding” of our lives just keeps on going, oblivious to whether we’re fulfilled or not.
