No one knows better than we that mindsets are notoriously difficult to change. The mindsets that get the most press are the "bad" ones that are harmful to health or that contradict the image we’d like to project. But what of those mindsets that divorce us from the way life is really lived?
To begin, nature including our specific genetic inheritance determines our mindsets and limits our ability to oversee and to adapt to the demands of modern life. In addition, our culturally premised ego has us access the certainty of the fixed vantage point rather than the open mind of our authentic independence or self-possession.
In other words, with respect to overseeing our lives, we are led by nature and aspects of culture to look not to our educated sensibilities, social competence and utility, but to our closed minds.
Our difficulties mount with our habit of confirmation bias, a cognitive tendency that encourages us to search for, favor and recall information in a way that confirms our mindsets while giving less consideration to alternative possibilities.
All in all, lacking an adequate understanding of the complicated forces and realities at work outside the complacencies that make up our button-down mindsets, we’re left creatively and emotionally boxed-in, frustrated and easily disturbed.
Applying Occam's Razor, we also know this: Our self-possession is nothing more than our oversight—our mind's ability to mind itself. In the stockpile of means necessary to an authentic oversight of mind, the discipline of thinking freely or openly is an irreplaceable tool.
Further, when we master our mind's ability to mind itself, our intransigent mindsets no longer appear as the immovable truth. And not least, much to our delight, our oversight becomes the source of a sweet inner lightness of being and of a compassionate boots-on-the-ground contribution to our civilization, person-to-person and at large.
Arnold Siegel is the founder of Autonomy and Life and the leader of its Retreat Workshops and Advanced Classes.