Resonant Navigation
essay
CONNECTIONS, 'GETTING IT WRONG', HABIT, INSIGHT
(This brief expository essay is for the philosophically inclined, verbal processors. It asks a number of questions which may be addressed experientially. It's also an example of how verbal thought problems, or teaching stories, are suitable materials for funding experiential process. squareONE uses cartoons for this purpose in the TEACHING CARTOONS workshop.)
Imagine a simple everyday task: selecting the best tomato out of a pile of possibly good tomatoes. You narrow the better candidates down to the best candidate. Now if the goal is changed and one is directed to find the ugliest tomato, what changes in both the purpose 'behind' the exploration and the way one goes about exploring?
This is a good example of the simple differentiation of generative assumptions. The purpose aimed at a particular goal is wed to assumptions which generate the specific approach. Strangely enough, the different approaches both can effect the same goal. One could find the best tomato by eliminating all the ugly ones or find the ugly tomato by eliminating all the good lookin' ones. It's a paradox: the goal changes, the assumptions change, but the approach doesn't have to change.
Yet the approach almost always changes! Something drives one to associate an equally effective approach with one set of assumptions and not with the other. There's a disconnection seemingly tacit at the level of assumptions but logically proved not to be directly hooked to the assumptions at all.
There's is a well known teaching story that gets at this same mysterious disconnection too.
A guy looses his car keys and is searching for them at night by a street lamp post. A friend, walking by, stops and asks the guy what he is doing.
"Oh I lost my keys in the driveway so I'm looking for them."
His friend is taken back! "But, your driveway is over there in the dark!"
"Yeah, I know, but this is where the light is."
The learning challenge of this story asks a deceptively simple question: "What do you think is the lesson of the story?. It actually is a very tricky story for it offers up a number of different lessons each -viewed as levels- less obvious and more unlikely.
(I'm giving no answers, except for the obvious, 'looking for a key where it cannot possibly be found'; the challenge is to go beyond this answer.) Let me know what you come up with.) I will give you a clue. Years ago my wife (ha! at the time,) lost her wedding ring in the field behind our house. She was in complete despair because it was pitch black at the time, about 11p.m.
I said to her, "No problem, I'll be right back."
I came back with a flashlight. She was still upset.
"You'll never find a tiny ring buried in the grass."
But, in seconds the beam of the flashlight picked out the gleam of the gold ring secreted deep in the rough field. (This story makes me seem much smarter than I am and a better husband than I was.) Nonetheless...your clue.
Here's another intentionally tricky hint: when is a question a better answer to a question than the answer is?
The deceptive aspect of teaching stories, many kinds of allegories and myths, and, (might as well lay it out,) our experience of our life and of the world, is how one apparent order may obscure all the other kinds of order embedded in the subject of our inquiry. We pick and choose. Seeming disorder, strangeness, contradiction, (etc.) may in fact be order we're unable to recognize.
Back to tomatoes. The second approach to the problem of sorting tomatoes strikes us as an un-viable solution to the problem. It's a simple logical error but it has a lot of force (especially the force of habit) behind it.
Generally we go with the least resistant approach. It may apparently be the most obvious workable approach or it may simply be the tried and true approach. Yet, it also can be called the approach which obscures all the other possible approaches, hides them from us. Even, at times it hides the better approach. In more complicated problems, the approach we opt for may obscure all the other ways the problem may be ordered and thus how all the solutions to the problem(s) may be ordered.
Working idea about this conundrum: many connections offer many possible insights; constrain the connections and so constrain the possible insights.
(October 2003)