Someone can ask "how can we be in error if we have the Church and the fathers to guide us?" My response is that St. Paul himself recognized the necessary limitation of his own understanding while in the earthly body (1 Corinthians 13:12). This does not mean that we should give up on growing or lose sight of the value of mentorship. However, why is it that we often neglect to seek counsel and even when we do it may be difficult to see the situation with the same clarity as our mentors? The answer is that learning is always preceded by a recognition of one's ignorance. When we, like the Phari
sees in John 9, overestimate our own understanding, we are in danger of hearing from Christ "If you were blind, you would have no sin; but now you say, ‘We see.’ Therefore your sin remains."
This self righteous ignorance is the first stage of learning, which is called by educators the stage of unconscious incompetence. Simply seeing our limitation moves us into the second stage of conscious incompetence, during which we can start to work on closing the now recognized deficit. Eventually we can hopefully reach the fourth and final stage of unconscious competence, characterized by an effortless expertise that does not require constant attention and mental effort, such as a baseball player who can hit a 90mph fastball. Before this final stage is the third stage, conscious competence, in which the student needs constant effort to demonstrate competence, which at times can be dangerous; for example, if someone is consciously competent at doing a complex task like surgery, it is easy to make a mistake if he takes his mind off the task to think about something else. At times, the distracting thought is along the lines of "wow I'm getting really good at this" - I warn you that if this thought crosses your mind your are about to make a mistake because you are consciously competent and taking your mind off your task.
So what is the solution? First we need to recognize that every one of us has a bias and our personal experience affects our interpretation of any situation. On the most basic sensory level what we "see" is not just a function of what light pattern hits our retina but rather how our it is perceived by our visual cortex, which is really more of an interpretation and not just a reception of a stimulus. If you doubt this look at this optical illusion that should prove to you that you and your brain are an active participant in what you think you are passively seeing. "So what? Maybe my eyes can be fooled but I know I am not biased when it comes to important things." How can you be so sure? What are the odds that a simple stimulus like vision can be subject to bias but a complex stimulus like "do I like this idea" is immune? Indeed, there is a tremendous amount of social science research that supports the idea that how we perceive and react to a situation is highly dependent on our previous experience.
If you come away with nothing else from reading this I hope you at least stop to question yourself and ask: 1) do I really know as much as I think I know?; and 2) am I sure that I am formulating an unbiased opinion? If the answer to either of these questions is potentially "no" then you need someone to give you another perspective. Ideally this is not just someone with more experience but also someone with a different enough background that there is at least a chance that this person will have a dissenting opinion. If all we do is discuss ideas with peers who have a homogenous background then we can't be surprised if it seems like we are "always right" and never hear correction.
You either know exactly what I'm talking about because you have made enough mistakes to know your own limitations or you think I need to speak for myself because this does not apply to you. Let us pray for God to help us find ourselves in the first category. Let us see that when we are facing trials and tribulations it may be God teaching us that we are always going to be limited and we need to rely on our mentors and the guidance of the Holy Spirit rather than on our own understanding. May God help us to see our blindness so that we may begin to see.
sees in John 9, overestimate our own understanding, we are in danger of hearing from Christ "If you were blind, you would have no sin; but now you say, ‘We see.’ Therefore your sin remains."
This self righteous ignorance is the first stage of learning, which is called by educators the stage of unconscious incompetence. Simply seeing our limitation moves us into the second stage of conscious incompetence, during which we can start to work on closing the now recognized deficit. Eventually we can hopefully reach the fourth and final stage of unconscious competence, characterized by an effortless expertise that does not require constant attention and mental effort, such as a baseball player who can hit a 90mph fastball. Before this final stage is the third stage, conscious competence, in which the student needs constant effort to demonstrate competence, which at times can be dangerous; for example, if someone is consciously competent at doing a complex task like surgery, it is easy to make a mistake if he takes his mind off the task to think about something else. At times, the distracting thought is along the lines of "wow I'm getting really good at this" - I warn you that if this thought crosses your mind your are about to make a mistake because you are consciously competent and taking your mind off your task.
So what is the solution? First we need to recognize that every one of us has a bias and our personal experience affects our interpretation of any situation. On the most basic sensory level what we "see" is not just a function of what light pattern hits our retina but rather how our it is perceived by our visual cortex, which is really more of an interpretation and not just a reception of a stimulus. If you doubt this look at this optical illusion that should prove to you that you and your brain are an active participant in what you think you are passively seeing. "So what? Maybe my eyes can be fooled but I know I am not biased when it comes to important things." How can you be so sure? What are the odds that a simple stimulus like vision can be subject to bias but a complex stimulus like "do I like this idea" is immune? Indeed, there is a tremendous amount of social science research that supports the idea that how we perceive and react to a situation is highly dependent on our previous experience.
If you come away with nothing else from reading this I hope you at least stop to question yourself and ask: 1) do I really know as much as I think I know?; and 2) am I sure that I am formulating an unbiased opinion? If the answer to either of these questions is potentially "no" then you need someone to give you another perspective. Ideally this is not just someone with more experience but also someone with a different enough background that there is at least a chance that this person will have a dissenting opinion. If all we do is discuss ideas with peers who have a homogenous background then we can't be surprised if it seems like we are "always right" and never hear correction.
You either know exactly what I'm talking about because you have made enough mistakes to know your own limitations or you think I need to speak for myself because this does not apply to you. Let us pray for God to help us find ourselves in the first category. Let us see that when we are facing trials and tribulations it may be God teaching us that we are always going to be limited and we need to rely on our mentors and the guidance of the Holy Spirit rather than on our own understanding. May God help us to see our blindness so that we may begin to see.
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