So far we have looked at PTV, how it arose and how it spread via the medieval church into the Western education system.
We saw how this truth-driven education system with its emphasis on ‘the search for certainty’ was exported to Australia and around the world, and, how your own brain may have become infected.
The Effects of PTV
If this is so, how does PTV work to inhibit your abilities as a sovereign thinker. Well, as a cognitive disease, PTV in your brain can produce a number of deleterious effects. Let’s look at just four manifestations of PTV:
- Brain Vain (opinion pride and conceit)
- Righteous and Sightless (consequence blindness)
- Space Glutton (output-mania)
- Lazy Critic (mistake-phobia)
Brain Vain
A brain vain thinker is one who is suffering from opinion pride. This PTV-infected brainuser is unable to see a better way of looking at things. Because the brain vain thinker is so proud of her or his own opinion they find it difficult to do any other kind of thinking but to defend it.
The more intelligent the brain vain thinker, the more they may suffer from this kind of cognitive conceit. Very bright thinkers who are PTV-infected may be only using their brainpower to defend their opinion. They are unable to escape from their viewpoint to look for a much better one.
Righteous and Sightless
The righteous brain is blind to consequences. PTV may have so incapacitated a True Believer that he is unable to see the results of his actions. In the belief that they are “morally right” any action is justified by the Righteous and Sightless, regardless of what follows. This is a very dangerous condition and so often fatal.
Millions have rushed headlong into death because ‘God is on our side’. Millions have been killed because they are ‘infidels’, ‘Jews’, ‘Catholics’ or ‘Protestants’. “I-am-right-and-you-are-wrong” is the hallmark of the Righteous and Sightless condition.
In 1994, John Paul II urged all Roman Catholic Cardinals to reflect on this aspect of the Church’s history. He wrote to them asking them to seize the unique beginning of the new millennium to recognise the “dark side of its history”. He asked: “How can one remain silent about the many forms of violence perpetrated in the name of the faith–wars of religion, tribunals of the Inquisition and other forms of violations of the rights of persons.”
Space Glutton
In a meeting, the space glutton always takes up considerably more than his or her fair share of airtime. Space gluttons may suffer from output mania, the inability to shut-up.
Gathering input by listening to the opinions of others is an important cognitive skill which is crippled in the space glutton. PTV may allow the thinker to wreak such enthusiasm for his or her own ideas that he or she is quite unable to listen to others.
In business, much creativity and productivity is lost in meetings due to those suffering from this condition. This condition is disastrous for those in sales or in management.
Lazy Critic
Lazy critics suffer from mistake-phobia, the morbid fear of ever making a mistake. The PTV-infected brain has an aversion to ever being wrong. It comes from our medieval habit of looking at the world through the concept of “right” and “wrong” (not shared as much by other cultures like the Chinese).
When a sovereign thinker is about to try something new, he never really knows what will happen. There is always risk and uncertainty. This risk is enough to keep the mistake-phobiac hiding in inertia. As an effective disguise the mistake-phobiac often assumes the role of ‘the critic’.
Taking pot-shots from the relative safety of his bunker of reluctance, the lazy critic simply waits for another thinker to make a mistake and then the whingeing and whining begins.
These are a few of the cognitive conditions caused by PTV, there are many others. The purpose of the School of Thinking is to help brainusers deal with these conditions by designing and offering tools they can use.
Since 1979, SOT has developed a number of tools and strategies. You can see them at the SOT Dashboard for Thinkers. For example:
- ‘thinking caps’,
- ‘brain software’ and
- ‘memeplexes’.
The Brain Software
The SOT brain software is provided in Part Two of this training which begins in the coming lessons and is for you to use at school, at work, at home and at play.
SOT Brain Software consists of a dashboard or suite of four software codes for your brain. This SOT dashboard contains 15 mind-tools. These mind-tools can be used by the brainuser in an ever-widening repertoire of combinations to produce a virtually unlimited number of effects.
The SOT neuro-software is a four-part code:
SDNT CVSTOBVS QRH PRR
Each code or acronym stands for a specific piece of brain software which will be dealt with in the following chapters.
Once it is programmed into your brain, the neuroware helps to neutralize or by-pass PTV by giving you, the brainuser, a simple way to increase your awareness of the thinking strategies that are available to you in any situation that comes your way.
DFQ #058:
Over the next 24 hours, try to notice at least one example of each of the following:
– Brain Vain (opinion pride and conceit)
– Righteous and Sightless (consequence blindness)
– Space Glutton (output-mania)
– Lazy Critic (mistake-phobia).
This is a big problem, am a victim of all them, I will do everything possible to reformate my brain
Brain Vain – Inside a very structured organisation, there is limited progression as the gatekeeper is not responsive to others ideas by always portraying a more strategic focussed result.
This one took awhile for me to comply as it seemed easy to do at first but I spent more time interpreting my involvement with others than their input.
Righteous and Sightless – one worker never thinks about the comments he makes but always pays the price for foot in mouth disease.
Space Glutton – at most meetings we have a person who regularly interrupts others while they are speaking but doesn’t add value with what she is saying other than upsetting that person.
Lazy Critic – I see this regularly in meetings from people who are scared at appearing weak by not admitting their lack of knowledge or maintaining their hold on outdated belief’s.
I suffer from all of these, and it is fairly easy for me to see when these pop up. I think that sometimes we need to push ahead using these techniques to our advantage. Trying to strike these behaviors from our psyche will not bring us close to a bvs. Accepting when we are closer to right than others, or when others in the room need to be coaxed into speaking or when others need to hear that their idea has flaws is positive. I behave in these PTV ways a little too much and try to keep it minimized, but I am accepting of these PTV idiosyncrasies as not all bad.
Righteous and Sightless–seems to be the PTV in the riots in Baltimore heavy in the news tonight.
In the past I may have suffered from Lazy Critic–fear of making a mistake. I did learn what I was doing and it seemed more harmonious at the time. I don’t find myself in that position now and I’m grateful.
It will be interesting to see more PTV examples. My journey is always cvs to bvs.
Moving from a CVS to BVS I realize at some point I have been guilty of most of these traits, I’m not proud of it but now aware of it I can disengage from them and move to a higher plane. In doing so I can also see the other people in my workplace that also engage in these behaviors. The lesson for me is to use all the SOT learnings to move to a BVS and rise above and away permanently to better myself. I want to teach my Children to do the same.
– Brain Vain (opinion pride and conceit) Many people who surround us are this kind. (The head of the department where I work, some of my colleagues)
— Righteous and Sightless (consequence blindness) My husband, some of my colleagues
— Space Glutton (output-mania) I cannot say who suffers this in my environment…Some students, probably… with whom I work…
— Lazy Critic (mistake-phobia). It is about me…I often find myself doubting…
Like Abdiel, I find that personally the PTV aspects covered in this lesson have been minimised within my day to day thought processes. However I do still struggle with eradicating the Space Glutton tendencies in me as I can still get to enthusiastic with trying to convey my thoughts and ideas when in a group situation. I am usually so excited about them that as a result I fail to give people adequate opportunity to put forward their own ideas and variations on the same topic. I have however noticed aspects of all of the PTV traits in others in meetings I have attended and through the media during the past 24 hours.
I noticed that I did them all in my thinking which clearly impacts the way I chose to interact with my world.
I also noticed examples in the meetings I have attended over the last few days.
Sincerely, I had all those earlier in and at various stages of my growth and progress. Now they have been greatly minimised. In November 2014, I was in an international training camp and one of the participants wondered how I could calmly sit back and listens to various perspectives in a group discussion. It is clear to me now, the reason why: Sovereign Thinking and the consciousness that accepts the different perspectives proferred by others in their thinking.
– Brain Vain (opinion pride and conceit) – A fellow co-worker that is constantly giving me his opinion because he believes that he is always right even though most of the times he is very negative.
– Righteous and Sightless (consequence blindness) – It totally baffles me, when I hear some managers say that “it is my way or the high way.” This also is followed by, ” if you don’t like it, get the hell out.”
– Space Glutton (output-mania) – During our weekly meetings at work, there is a co-worker that will go about a specific issue as if that is the only issue that dominates the entire store. She just gets so hyped up about it that any positive feedback to improve the situation is shunned immediately without hesitation accompanied by verbal diarrhea.
– Lazy Critic (mistake-phobia) – At work, I have observed that people hold back a lot in expressing what is right. There is a belief system that is dominated by fear. It is believed that If a person ignores what is wrong and just stays quiet, letting things just be, a person can go a long way. This has been totally incorrect because the company has been looking for positive leaders to emerge from the wood work.