Why is that Pin-Tailed Wydah Attacking my Kitchen Window!?

Or

Our Distorted Maps of Reality

A beautiful, energetic male pin-tailed whydah that frequents our bird feeder has a very strange and mysterious practice of flying in to the outside of our kitchen windows aggressively and poking/crashing the glass with its beak. Does it see its reflection in the window as a potential threat to its territory? Does the stained glass bird on the inside threaten it in some strange way? I doubt I’ll ever know the psychological or instinctual inner workings of this quixotic wydah.

The frequent attacks and window tapping got me thinking about how I do similar things most days – how all humans do similar things. We have distorted maps of reality as M. Scott Peck reminded us in ‘The Road Less Travelled.’ Every day I catch myself misinterpreting or misunderstanding something – and realizing I have a distorted sense of reality. One of my classic and repetitive distortions is estimating how long I think it will take to do something ~ doing the time warp again. My wife used to say to me ‘take that estimate and multiply it at least by 3,’ and she was (annoyingly) consistently right! In any relationship we are in we sometimes get disappointed by the other person, only to realize in that moment that we had an expectation we did not verbalise, or that was hidden or unconscious to us; so it is no wonder this ‘distorted map of reality’ leads to confusion and hurt. 

There are so many forms of ‘distortion’ and self-deception available to us! We tell ourselves ‘rational – lies’ when we rationalize many things away that we don’t like. Between our egos creating an ‘ideal self’ and the personas and masks we develop as forms of social protection, we start believing these are our real, deep, authentic selves, when they are only particular limited dimensions of our true self. We regularly practice ‘wishful thinking’ as a form of trying to bend reality, when these ideas are not grounded in experience or reality. Anger and  blaming others (among a host of other thoughts and emotions) are very often forms of us projecting our inner blind spots and issues onto others, with no conscious awareness that we are doing so. I love William Torbert’s action logic work that suggests ‘every thought is a hypothesis to be tested.’ We make so many assumptions and never test them by directly asking another person if our perception is accurate. 

In M. Scott Peck’s classic book ‘The Road Less Travelled’ he develops a clear line of thinking about distorted maps of reality from his clinical experience as a psychiatrist. Everyone has a map of reality developed in childhood, shaped by upbringing, culture and early experiences. In ‘Hymns to an Unknown God’ Sam Keen describes this as ‘Every culture, nation, tribe, family casts a spell over individual members. Our identity, our values, our worldviews, and our stories are assigned to us unconsciously by an accident of birth … are shaped by authorities we did not choose. And each of us must review this personal history to set ourselves free.’ Different educational psychology and philosophical traditions call this map a worldview, a way of being, a structure of interpretation, a mindset, our beliefs and assumptions, etc. Distorted maps cause suffering: when our maps are inaccurate, outdated, or based on denial, they lead to poor decisions, emotional dysfunction, and pain. We use a range of defense mechanisms to maintain our distortions – projection, repression, withdrawal, reaction formation, aggression, intellectualization and humour, among many others. Those of us who work with the Enneagram know how powerfully it helps people pull back the curtain on these complex inner workings. According to Peck, our mental and spiritual health depends on the accuracy of our maps. He says truth seeking is a spiritual path, ‘growth requires the painful but necessary work of correcting our distorted maps of reality; the truth is this is the foundation of mental and spiritual well being.’

Could the ultimate distortion of reality be a lack of awareness of a spiritual dimension to life and what possibilities that opens up? It is fascinating for me to become more aware of rational scientists who eventually became spiritually receptive: Richard Schwarz of Internal Family Systems saying his clinical experiences have consistently revealed undeniable spiritual healing phenomena that conventional science cannot explain; Albert Einstein speaking of a ‘cosmic religious feeling’ and ‘the mind of God;’ physicist David Bohm positing the “implicate order” theory proposing that the visible universe unfolds from a deeper, hidden dimension of reality, which many interpret as spiritual; geneticist Frances Collins who led the Human Genome Project advocating for harmony between scientific inquiry and faith; the list is long – George Ellis, Eben Alexander, Carl Jung, Deepak Chopra, Iain McGilchrist, etc. The Jesuit Antony de Mello describes spirituality as ‘waking up’ to real life in all of the spiritual and philosophical traditions.

Many forms of self-delusion, fake news, fundamentalism and either-or binary thinking dominate the political and cultural milieux around me. I find the call to seek truth in a complex world – to be open to and actively trying to correct my distorted maps of reality – to be a sane spiritual-emotional path that has deep integrity (helps me with integration and individuation). I’m noticing so many personal and cultural foundations being shaken, shattered, morphing, disappearing … change is all around me and in me all the time, every day, every moment and I’m trying to ‘wake up’ and notice it. I invite you to start noticing the distortions (it is fun and liberating, not just painful) and join this path of integrity.