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“What made this brain of mine, do you think?
Not the need to move my limbs;
for a rat with half my brains moves as well as I.
Not merely the need to do, but the need to know what I do,
lest in my blind efforts to live I should be slaying myself.”—G. B. Shaw, Man and Superman
How does a wife leap from an experience of overcooked eggs for breakfast to the conclusion, “I have to get a divorce!”? How does a husband jump from noticing his wife's silence to deciding that he “married the wrong woman”?
All of us, all the time, attend to a limited scope of experience, and then categorize it to create meaning and understanding. This automatic unconscious process usually works very well. But at other times and places it can also lead us into very unpleasant, confusing, and sometimes deadly traps. My fundamental purpose in writing this book is to understand how we do this, and how we can use these understandings to change the scope we attend to, and/or recategorize it in a way that serves us better.
For instance, the wife, starting with her experience of “overcooked eggs” may have categorized her husband as “uncaring” and then thought of all the other times when he didn't do what she wanted, decide that he “doesn't love her,” and see divorce as her only choice. But if she had been more aware of her husband while he was cooking the eggs, she could have noticed that he lost track of the eggs because he was diligently arranging some important events for the children on the phone.
The husband, noticing his wife's silence, may have categorized this as “indifference,” remembered earlier girl friends' attentiveness, and decide that he “married the wrong woman.” If he had been more attentive to her he could have realized that she was very tired from a long hard day at work, and needed a little “alone time” before fully attending to him/
When we understand how we unconsciously attend to a scope of experience, immediately categorize it, and then respond to the meaning of this categorization, it opens up a world of alternative choices and options. When we don't like the meaning of an event, we can change the scope and/or category that we are attending to, in order to change its meaning.
Scope and category interact with each other in several ways. A change in scope often changes the way we categorize an experience. As I was writing this, my wife asked me for a “sticky” for a note to put on a letter, and when I offered her a pink one, she said she wanted a yellow one. I categorized this as “picky” and unreasonable, thinking that a pink one would surely do just as well, and felt irritated as I searched for a yellow one. Then I saw that the letter was on bright pink paper; a pink sticky would be nearly invisible on it, so her request for a yellow one was quite reasonable after all! A larger scope changed how I categorized her request, the resulting meaning I made, and my response to her.
A category can also be subdivided into more specific categories, or combined with others into more general categories, creating “logical levels” of thinking. Often we climb rapidly up this ladder of levels, arriving at a categorization that is not useful.
For instance, perhaps you can think of a time when you were doing something very well, and then realized that someone else was observing you. Probably your ability to do that activity decreased as you became self-conscious, recategorizing what you were doing as some kind of “performance” or “evaluation.” In that case a larger scope created a problem, rather than a solution.
If you review a recent argument with your spouse, or someone else special to you, and then think of all the other positive experiences that you have had with that person, that larger group of scopes will automatically change your feelings, and make it easier to communicate reasonably about your differences.
Categorization always alters the scope of our experience. The category “all the other positive experiences that you have had with that person,” brought many other images to your mini placing the argument in a much broader “perspective” of a group of other scopes.
If someone says to you, “That's an interesting way to do that,” and you categorize that statement as a “criticism,” you will tend to feel bad, and then think of other unpleasant experiences in that category, and feel even worse. But if you categorize the statement as a “compliment,” you will feel pleased, and then tend to think of it in the context of other compliments, and feel even more pleased.
These many interactions between scope and category can sometimes make it difficult to discover the different sequential steps in what is usually a very rapid unconscious process, but the result is well worth it—a huge decrease in frustration, helplessness, and unpleasantness, and a corresponding increase in your freedom, choice, and satisfaction.
Understanding how we understand the things and events around us is one of the most difficult things we can do, because we have to use our process of understanding in order to understand the process, a bit like using a microscope to examine itself. The limitations and biases in our way of understanding can easily blind us to those same limitations.
All verbal description is as linear and sequential as the words on this page. But events in the real world, and in our minds, are only partly sequential; many are simultaneous. It is impossible to describe simultaneous events using a sequence of words. As I describe one or more aspects of how we create understanding and meaning in our lives, I often have to temporarily ignore others that are happening at the same time. So if at times, you think, “Wait, what about—?” a little patience will usually give me an opportunity to respond to your concern.
Because of all these complicating factors, I have to start with some relatively simple distinctions, definitions, and examples, and then assemble these into a foundation for describing more complex ones, and their practical applications.
If the first few chapters sometimes seem a bit plodding and irrelevant to understanding life's problems, a little patience will be rewarded with a multitude of very useful practical applications. For a quick taste of some of these, you can look ahead to chapters 12 and 13 on recategorization, or try the Aggregate Categorical Scope Perspective Exercise on page 175.
Since the earlier chapters of this book lay a foundation of understanding for what follows, reading them first makes it much easier to make full use of the remaining chapters, most of which could be read in any order. However, if you like to browse, dipping briefly into later chapters can be a way to discover the usefulness of what lies ahead, before returning to the beginning chapters. Each chapter has a summary at the end, so that is another way to quickly preview the range of topics included.
This book points to different aspects of your experience, and offers you new ways to think about it, organize it, clarify it, expand it, and give you more choices about how you can change it when it serves you. But ultimately the answers will be in your own experience, in your exploring and finding out how your mind works.
Scope and category are fundamental processes that underlie every human experience—from ordinary confusions and satisfactions, to the blissful experiences described by some mystics and spiritual teachers. They provide a way to unify, organize, and reexamine all the useful methods and understandings that have been developed in the field of psychotherapy and personal development over the years. They can also be used to clearly identify why some approaches are “dead end” paths that lead nowhere—or worse.
Like a small boy with a new hammer, I have been happily looking everywhere, to find what else I can pound with these new tools, finding more and more useful applications. Many sections of this book have gone through substantial revisions, sometimes because I have recognized my own mistakes, but more often because others have pointed them out. There are probably still mistakes that we didn't find, and I look forward to others' further corrections and additions in the ongoing search for useful understandings. If my writing seems unclear at times, please heed Warren S. McCulloch's plea, “Don't bite my finger; look where I'm pointing.”
Steve Andreas
March, 2006
“I was born not knowing, and have had only a little time to change that here and there.”
—Richard P. Feynman
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