The Core of Dialogue: Recognizing Our Filters
I wish all the people in the world who don’t agree with me, especially those who cause me trouble, would wake up tomorrow morning convinced my opinions are right. It would make life so much easier. I wouldn’t have to struggle to understand them and they wouldn’t need to put any effort into understanding me. We’d both be happy and our sorry globe would not feel quite so wobbly and unstable. After all, it’s not me that’s creating all that commotion, it’s the other guy. . . . .
- the most important thing about a spiritual or peak experience is the experience itself;
- the second most important thing is what we make of that experience, how we incorporate it into the other experiences of our lives and how we use it to shift some awareness in ourselves of how we relate to the world; and
- the third most important thing is what we tell others about our experience.
In other words, your experience is always run through your filters, filters which have been shaped by not only the beliefs of what you have been told is true, but by what your own previous experience tells you is true. Those beliefs can not help but shape the way you respond to your experiences and how you explain your experiences to others. That is why each experience that is “similar” to others that came before it becomes more “evidence” that your beliefs are true, although what is really happening is that you are adding another layer to your filters.
What I believe is particularly important to remember in these troubled times is that if this is true for you, it is true for others. They, too, have had thousands of experiences to which you are not privy. They, too, have filters. They, too, are examples of the truth that is expressed in a sign inside the front door of Holy Cross primary school in North Belfast, Ireland:
If we’d been born where they were born and taught what they were taught, we would believe what they believe.
Unfortunately, we forget this and instead insist on attributing “truth” to our experiences and dismiss the experiences of others as “mistaken beliefs.” How can we bridge the gap created by this very human characteristic, a gap that seems to widen every day as positions become more solid and immovable?
I suggest we need to continually remind ourselves that filters are filters. They may come in different colors, different shapes, different thicknesses. They may have been around for decades or we may have only acquired them recently. When we understand this, we appreciate what Alfred Korzybski, father of general semantics, meant when he said that, “The map is not the territory.” Our words are abstractions, not the “reality” we are trying to describe. They may be the best any of us can do, but they are still only a filter through which we view that which we consider reality.
When I say this, I don’t mean that everything is relative, that one idea is as good as another, that we can’t know the truth. But I believe strongly that no one has a monopoly on truth and that each of us has only a glimpse of part of the truth, as though we are all looking through a telescope focused on one fraction of the night sky. The stars we see are a piece of what is reality, they are not the whole of it.
Therefore, when I acknowledge that I am seeing the world through my experiences and you are doing the same, I’m less likely to get all tied up in knots because you aren’t seeing things as I see them. You and I have different filters through which we see the world.
Understanding this fact is the core of dialogue.