Brad Banton – TRANSCRIPT
OK, so what about honesty? What would it be for you, just among your friends to change the degree of honesty? What if you’re just honest all the time, with everyone that you know? People that you already know, and you weren’t too worried about being tactful, or diplomatic you just said whatever you thought, like a kid, like a child. What do you think it would do to your relationships? What would be different if you were radically honest?
There’s a story of a woman who interviewed for a job, and her potential boss asked her a question in the interview: What do you consider to be your worst fault? She said, “Honesty.”
He said, “I don’t think honesty’s a fault.”
And she said, “I don’t give a fuck what you think.”
I really like that joke. I think, would you hire her if you were the boss? I would. I would want someone that I could depend on not to cater to me. That I could rely on to handle things and be honest.
There is this problem about being honest, about what’s going through your mind, and the problem is that we have three minds. We have at least three minds, and we’ve been taught all of our lives that our mind is a very valuable thing, and that thinking is the most important thing. I don’t think that’s right. Our first mind is called the reactive mind and that’s basically we are a recording device, we’ve been recording multisensory recordings of what happens to us since we were in the womb.
We didn’t have vision in there but we have these multisensory recordings of successive moments of now. We have them filed in a somewhat orderly fashion, some of them weren’t recorded too well, some of them were a little off but they still are built into us, we have these records of things we’ve experienced. They’re not just sight and sound, they’re tasty, touchy, feely, smelly proprioceptive recordings. So that’s one mind, that’s called the reactive mind.
And that’s because whenever something was recorded it had a little bit of trauma in it or some shock or something like that, that got recorded with it. Then every now and then those things just kind of pop up later on in your life. So that’s the reactive mind.
The next mind is called the personal construct mind. That’s based on replicated experiences. We have this experience of something over and over again. Say the baby has the experience of nursing, and then not nursing, and then nursing and not nursing, and after a while, after many, many repetitions of this, a little construct begins in the mind of the baby: nursing time and not nursing time.
Then the baby cries when it wants nursing and gets nursed, and after a while that gets in there, and she starts operating on the construct: nursing, wanting nursing, crying, and then getting nursed. It works just fine except when she wants nursing, and she cries, and she doesn’t get it, she gets really really pissed off. We have all these little things in there, of expectations associated with constructs that we built in our minds. That’s what we call the personal construct mind.
Then we have the categorical mind, or the planning mind, the linear mind, the one we usually think of as our mind. It’s mostly verbal skills and has to do with having definitions of things and points to objects and ideas; the mind the way we think of it. The problem is that these three minds turn on and off more or less at random, and they’re not very accurate. In fact, there is a section of one of my books, titled — it’s a take-off on the advertisement from the American Negro College Fund, they say, “a mind is a terrible thing to waste” – and my book says a mind is a terrible thing wasted. These minds are very unreliable instruments, and one of the things that makes them unreliable is that they tend to get mixed up, they confuse each other. Like our categorical mind likes to take responsibility for things that just popped into our head.