Two Exercises:
The 3 Buckets and Create Your Own Timeline
The 3 Buckets
If you have access to three buckets or large bowls, water and five minutes, you can gain some insights to the relative nature of your conditioning by doing this exercise.
Put cold water in one bucket, or bowl, placed to your left, comfortably hot water (not scalding
– no lawsuits, please!) in a bowl to your right, and lukewarm ("just right")
water in a middle bowl. Place your left hand in the cold water and your
right hand in the comfortably hot water. Keep them (your hands) submerged
in the water for about a minute. Then pick them up (still talking about
your hands now) and place them both in the middle bowl.
What do your senses tell you about the water temperature in the middle bowl?
You're probably sharp enough to speculate what happens. (But come on, go ahead and do it
for yourself anyway.) Your left hand, conditioned by the cold water, tells
you that the middle water is "warmer"; while your right hand, conditioned
by the comfortably hot water tells you the middle water is "cooler". You
have only one stimulus – the middle bowl of water – but you have two different
sensory responses. Which one is "right"?
Just like the left and
right hands in the experiment, we are each 'conditioned' by our past. Each
of us has lived through our own unique, no-two-the-same life experiences.
To every new situation or experience, we bring our own unique perspectives
and attitudes resulting from our past experiences. We therefore can’t help
but experience each situation uniquely from anyone else. If we fail to
recognize this – if we expect others to see or feel or smell or otherwise
experience something exactly the same as we do – then we forget the lesson
of the three water buckets:
This (warmer
water to the left hand) is not that (cooler water to the right hand);
or
This (high
school experience of a student from Harwood Junior High) is not that
(high school experience of a student from Euless Junior High);
This (what
I find “pretty”) is not that (what you find “ugly”).
This (what
I find “funny”) is not that (what you find “revolting”).
This (what
I find “offensive”) is not that (what you find “satirical”).
Etc.
Create Your Own History Timeline
One of the key GS formulations is what Korzybski termed "time-binding", which might be explained as:
the unique capability of humans to use language - and other symbol systems - to accumulate knowledge from generation to generation, such that the child can pick up where the parent left off, continually adding to our store of human knowledge, building on the achievements of those who came before us
To better appreciate how you've personally benefitted from the time-binding of others, and to put our degree and rate of progress into some type of perspective, create your own timeline of history.
Exercise:
- Make a list of all the notable People, Periods, Events and Discoveries (inventions, achievements, etc.) you can think of.
- Plot each person or event you've listed on a timeline of history, from 500 B.C. to the present.
What inferences, insights, observations can you make from the timeline you've created? What individuals, events or developments facilitated time-binding? Which retarded or blocked progress?
Compare your timeline to others.
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