What Happened Next?
This is an experiment to help understand THOUGHT and the implication of Separate Realities.
Instructions
Show participants a picture (see options) and get them to note the answer to the following questions:
What is happening in the picture, what happened before, and what happened after?
Give people a couple of minutes to jot down their thoughts
Put people into small groups to compare notes
Debrief
Explore what they noticed about the discussion. You are less focussed on exactly what their stories were as to the comparison with others.
You could ask:
Did everyone have exactly the same story?
What was different about the stories?
Did anyone notice something in the picture that others in their group didn’t see?
Did those things influence their story? Did it change when listening to other people’s stories?
Did anyone have a feeling that came with the story?
Draw out : everyone’s mind went to different places in the first place - without them trying, their version appeared true/right/obvious to them, different people will have noticed some completely different aspects/elements even though they were all looking at the same picture, at times there’s a feeling attached, it wasn’t that they just had different views. Sometimes their perspective changed when they heard someone else’s.
Essentially with the same input everyone’s mind did something different/everyone ‘made’ something different from it.
Why do they think this is?
EXTRA : Share the actual story of the picture
Notice how the story of the picture changes again without you having to try to change it.
Explanation
We instantly create a reality with our mind from what’s going on around us – it’s innocent, and our reality looks obvious – to us but maybe not to someone else. What we notice and what we make of it is all governed by thought.
LINK – Our experience is created from the INSIDE -> OUT through the power of THOUGHT. An implication of this is understanding that everyone has a Separate Reality of anything and everything that is happening.
What implications does this have for meetings/conversations/interactions? – because this is happening all the time!
ALTERNATIVE USE
You can use this experiment to show how our reality of something shifts with thought by highlighting how ‘real’ their story about the photo looks and how it changes naturally when they listen to others and hear the actual story of the image.
This is a picture we often use but you can find lots of options in the New York Times ‘What’s going on in this picture feature’.
This picture was taken by Nikki in Kenya. The image is of park rangers in a conservation area, who are taking a break after giving a White Rhino a bath, one of them has a brush to wash the rhino. They are telling stories and laughing.