Flipping the Switch on Our Perception of Things

 

[Note to readers:  The excerpt about Marjorie Taylor Greene first appeared in my Substack post of January 14, https://dalelugenbehl.substack.com/ .  The story about Greene in the following blog post is used here to introduce a different and nonpolitical lesson to be gleaned from Greene’s experience.]

 

After years of steadfastly supporting President Trump, Majorie Taylor Greene recently broke with Donald Trump and strongly repudiated him.  What follows is an excerpt from an article in New York Times Magazine focusing on what happened to Greene when she watched murdered right wing activist Charlie Kirk’s memorial service on television.

What stayed with Greene long afterward were the last two speakers who took the stage. First there was Kirk’s widow, Erika, who stood in white before the crowd filling the Arizona stadium, lifted her tear-filled eyes and said that she forgave her husband’s killer. And then there was President Trump. “He was a missionary with a noble spirit and a great, great purpose,” he said of Kirk. “He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them.”

[After the memorial service Greene said] “That was absolutely the worst statement…”  And the contrast between Erika Kirk and the president was clarifying, she added. “It just shows where his heart is. And that’s the difference, with her [Erika Kirk] having a sincere Christian faith, and proves that he does not have any faith.”

It also, Greene said, clarified something about herself. Over the past five years, as Trump’s most notorious acolyte in Congress, she had adopted his unrepentant pugilism as her own. “Our side has been trained by Donald Trump to never apologize and to never admit when you’re wrong,” she told me in her Capitol Hill office one afternoon in early December. “You just keep pummeling your enemies, no matter what. And as a Christian, I don’t believe in doing that. I agree with Erika Kirk, who did the hardest thing possible and said it out loud.”         ---Excerpted from “‘I Was Just So Naïve’: Inside Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Break With Trump,” by Robert Draper, New York Times Magazine, December 29, 2025 

Because of the stark contrast between Trump and Erika Kirk, Green suddenly saw with blinding clarity that Trump’s path was not her path.  Another person might have chosen to blot out this insight and continue on the same path. To her credit, Greene did not push this episode of clear seeing out of her mind, and she realized that there was no way she could continue to support Trump any more.  And then she took action about what she learned—she began to speak out about it even though doing so caused her to receive death threats to herself and her children.  This is an astounding and hopeful turn of events that we can all learn something from:  it is definitely possible for a person to make a sudden 180 degree turn for the better in life.

I started thinking about this and I remembered a similar but smaller radical turn in my own life.  The college in California where I was teaching at the time announced a new policy.  Henceforth, every teacher would be required to submit day-to-day lesson plans for all the classes they were teaching each and every school term.  At the beginning of each term, I would have to write up what we would doing in class on each date the class met, and then teach according to the plan submitted.  I was furious.  I can say (roughly) what topics we will take up, but not the dates or exactly how long we will spend on them because each class is different.  I said “This is higher education, I shouldn’t have to put up with this busy-work, controlling, administrative crap!”  I was going to go war over this:  “We’re professors, they can’t treat us this way; what about academic freedom?  I’ll go to the division dean and…”

Fortunately, in a matter of a few minutes Sandy helped me to radically reframe the situation. She said “If you go to war over this, you’ll just make enemies in administration and they won’t budge on what they want to do, and you will have spent vast amounts of emotional energy on a futile crusade.  As you well know, colleges are huge bureaucracies.  Those lesson plans will just go into a file somewhere and no one will ever read them or come to your classes to see if what you are doing is what your lesson plan says for that day.”  I instantly knew she was right, and revised how I was seeing the situation in my mind.  I just copied and pasted a topic from my syllabus for each date in the term, and then went about teaching the way I always have, and totally ignored the “lesson plan” I turned in.  Dale, save your energy for a better cause!   And the College was happy because they had their piece of paper collecting dust in a file cabinet somewhere.  (By the way, college administration never asked for this again in all the years I taught there!)  

Decades ago I was in a ten year live-in relationship with someone I’ll call Simone.  Fresh out of completing my formal education in philosophy, I was a huge advocate of fairness—everything had to be fair.  Simone and I kept track of practically everything—work done around the house, who spent what money, how much driving each of us had done for joint trips, and so on.  This last one about driving is especially interesting.  In my mind, it was not fair if one of us did most or all of the driving, so we had to keep track of who drove last and whose turn it was now (sounds ridiculous, I know).  Sometime later when Simone and I were no longer together I read a little story.

Da Free John is a spiritual teacher in the new age tradition whom I read at the insistence of a friend.  I found him incoherent but a story he told changed me instantly.  Da was having his picture taken in a studio by a professional photographer for one of his books.  He was really enjoying all the sights and gadgetry of the studio, examining equipment and talking with the photographer.  He also was not complying with the photographer’s requests who was getting increasingly annoyed and agitated with Da’s behavior.  At some point he said to Da “Listen, I am a professional photographer and what I’m telling you to do is necessary and right!” 

I’ll never forget Da’s response: “You might be right, but I’m happy.”  This photographer was so tied up in wanting to get things just right that he was incapable of enjoying the beauty of the equipment and the opportunity to get to know another person.  I finally saw that sometimes it is more important to be happy and bring happiness to others than to be right.  This really flipped a switch within me. 

Everything does not have to be fair—like who has driven the car the most.  It may not be fair that Sandy does all the driving when we go places but…  Here’s the thing.  I like being a passenger and Sandy is a terrible passenger—she hates it.  Sandy likes driving and is very good at it.  I don’t like driving and I’m not as good at it.  We’re both very happy with arrangement and it doesn’t really matter that it is “unfair.”  The same is true of many other jobs that are not distributed equally between us. 

On yet another occasion, Princeton philosopher Peter Singer instantly flipped my switch on eating meat when I read him in grad school.  He did this by giving me a totally different way of framing ethical issues regarding our treatment of other species.  I had always seen this issue in terms of whether other species had rights—which turned out to be a very complicated way of coming at the issue. 

Instead, Singer presented the issue as a conflict of interest between myself and the animals I had been blithely eating every day.  If a want to eat chicken flesh, that creates a conflict of interest between myself and a chicken.  My interest in wanting to eat the chicken is to satisfy a taste preference and to avoid learning to cook a plant-based diet.  The chicken’s interests in the conflict are to avoid death, incarceration in a hellish environment, satisfy its social needs with other chickens, and avoid pain.  In choosing to eat chicken, I am choosing to allow my trivial interests—taste preference and laziness—to override the nontrivial (vital) interests of another sentient being.  When it was put to me in this way, it instantly “flipped my switch” and I just didn’t want to eat that way anymore.  

Usually without our being aware of it, the way the mind frames things frequently causes us to see things from only one perspective and we mistake our mind-created perspective for reality.  We become trapped in seeing things in a certain way and it seems like that’s the way things really are.  But our being trapped in a view can change very quickly through an experience, a story, or seeing someone doing something differently.

Look at the first image on the left below.  Most people see it as a black vase.  But if someone tells or shows us what to look for, we realize that the same image can be seen as two people in profile facing each other against a black background.  Can you see it?  The suggestion as to how to look at it totally alters our thinking that it can only be seen one way.    

The image on the right is trickier.  Most people who look at it see it as a young woman’s face seen in profile and looking slightly away from us and to the left.  She has a feather in her dark hair and we can see the dark line of her left jaw.  But if we look again, perhaps with some help, we see the face of an older woman with a long, pointed chin looking slightly toward us and to our left.  The back of her head is mostly covered with a white scarf.   Our perceptions on this can flip in an instant.

 

We are often trapped and blinded by our own beliefs, so that it is very difficult for us to see a better way, much like a bird that feels trapped in a cage because it doesn’t see that the door is open.  Having a powerful new experience—like Greene had--or hearing a useful story—like I had with Da’s story and Singer’s explanation--can instantly set us free and totally change our mental landscape of what we need to be doing.  And the more we do this, the easier it becomes for us to do so and we become less and less trapped by the workings of our own minds.  The end result is more openness to other perspectives and the ability to free ourselves of beliefs and perceptions that are false. 

 

Sangha:  https://sites.google.com/view/ahimsa-acres-sangha/home

Ahimsa Acres Website:  https://www.ahimsaacres.org/

Dale Lugenbehl Substack:  https://dalelugenbehl.substack.com/

 

 

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