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Perceptual Positions

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I just love the way that the universe presents us with gifts. As I was driving to work this morning thinking about how this article might develop, I had to stop at the traffic lights coming down into Rawtenstall. Just before these lights is a pedestrian crossing, the junction making a three-way split. It can take quite a few minutes for them to change back to green if you miss-time it. As it was market day there were a lot of people around and many of them must be drivers who know what a pain it is for someone to start crossing just as the lights go green. It is only polite to stand back and allow the drivers to get through. Not this morning, however, this morning people just strode across the road oblivious to the drivers’ needs. As I considered this selfishness, one of the drivers pulled forward in anticipation and frustration and ended up parked on the pedestrian crossing so that the walkers now had to negotiate their way around the car. It really struck me how little “second positioning” goes on in the world these days, which is the theme of this article. Many of us seem to be losing the ability to put ourselves into the shoes of the “other”, and others haven’t even developed the skill yet.

It reminded me of a great story I have been reading to participants on our programmes for years. It comes from a very interesting book that discusses the links between Native American philosophy and quantum mechanics, “Blackfeet Physics”. The story is about a great feast that the one tribe invite another tribe to. The former are an agrarian people who store the food that they have grown so the feast becomes an opportunity to show how much food they have in store for the difficult winter months. According to their culture it is impolite to leave the table empty. For this reason, while the others kept eating they kept bringing more and more food to the table, muttering behind the scenes at how impolite they were for eating them out of house and home. The other tribe are a nomadic people who hunt food where and when they can, and have to eat whenever they can in preparation for times when there might be no food. According to their culture, you eat whatever your host places before you, and they came to believe that their hosts were trying to feed them to death as they tried to eat everything on the table.

I think that that story shows so eloquently how easy is for disagreements and conflicts to arise just because we have the inability to put ourselves in the “other’s” shoes; and what a relevant message for the world today.

However, this whole issue of “perceptual positions” is slightly more complex than just doing the exercises suggested elsewhere on this site. It is also a developmental issue.

Most psychologists today agree that human beings go through various developmental stages; how they split these and the names they give to them may differ but most agree on the broad principles. If we take Jane Loevinger’s stages as one example, she has discovered that we go from “egocentric” to “ethnocentric” to “worldcentric”. Translated in terms of Perceptual Positions, “egocentric” means taking the Self Position, “ethnocentric” means taking the Other Position with those I consider to be part of my tribe, and “worldcentric” means taking the Other Position with all other human beings (Ken Wilber has expanded this and added “Kosmocentric” where Other becomes all of creation and hence the Observer Position).

Loevinger discovered that all human beings go through these stages and in that order. Using NLP terminology, this ever expanding usage of Perceptual Positions means that we start in Self, shift into the ability to utilise a growing sense of Other, before we move on into Observer (what many of the wisdom traditions call the Witness).

Another researcher in the same field did an interesting experiment with young children that enabled him to work out when they first have the ability to take the Other Position. Give a very young child a large piece of card painted green on one side and blue on the other and then show him that you have an identical card; if you then hold up the card and ask him what colour you can see he will assume that you are seeing the colour that is visible to him. It is not that he is unwilling to see the world through you eyes; he is unable to see the world through your eyes. This ability develops later.

This got me thinking. Perhaps I am wasting my time internally railing against those who do not do second position; the truth may be that they haven’t yet developed that skill.

Today, 7^th July 2006, like many of you, I have been pondering once again the tragic events that unfolded a year ago.

If I am honest, my immediate thoughts on that fateful day were ones of gratitude that I wasn’t in London that day; my first position was the one of Self. My perspective then shifted to Others, but initially only those that I know well and care for. It was only when I knew that family and friends were safe that I expanded the realm of my consciousness to those caught up in the tragedy. This seems perfectly reasonable and human and appropriate; if we are to move into a position where we are really going to solve the problems of this world around us then we need to develop the ability to expand the limits of consciousness beyond the merely ethnocentric and into the realms of the worldcentric or even Kosmocentric.

I am one of those who has been perplexed and bored by the football but one thing that I noticed is that if you can keep people at the level of talking about “football” there are fewer disagreements and arguments but once this shrinks to “nation” or even “city”, the potential for conflict amplifies exponentially.

As a species we seem to identify very strongly with the concept of “tribe”. We need to belong and one of the strongest ways in which we identify is with the “tribe”. This is perfectly natural but the larger the unit that we can identify with, the safer we shall be as a species. I thought that this was perfectly exemplified by H.G. Wells in “The War Of The Worlds” when the threat posed by the Martians made all earthlings realise that only by identifying with the tribe of human being would they survive as a species.

My aim this month is to attempt to expand my awareness of my tribal membership.