Your Own Lighting Display

Going to see the lights on Temple Square was one of my favorite high school dating activities. I have gone back, since that time, on a number of occasions, to see the lights with my wife and kids. This year my oldest daughter went with the youth from our ward to Temple Square to see the lights. She returned and informed me that new and brighter LCD lights were used, this year, to decorate the trees on the temple grounds.

I also like driving around looking for great light displays. Driving around the neighborhood, looking at holiday lights has become a wonderful activity, especially with the advent of elaborate computerized Christmas lights set to music. I love to listen and watch these great choreographed masterpieces.

Now compare these various outdoor Christmas light displays with something a little different. Compare these lights with your own thoughts and ideas. Each of you have your own mental light display. You have collected these lights over the entire period of your life. Like the choreographed flashing lights you see on display, your thinking is an interactive process, you construct your thinking with new concepts you learn and concepts you already know. You give meaning to new information you receive from the old information and experiences you already have in your repertoire.

Your lights are unique to you. Although you may learn the same information as others, you use the content and the process of the communication in a different way. You interpret reality based on your own lighting display. You explore, analyze, communicate, create, ponder and reflect, based on past experiences, personal beliefs, and impressions from prior learning.

Truth, however, is not subjective, no matter what lights you use in your display. Truth is like the electricity (or lack thereof) in your holiday light display. Light and truth are as real as the power of electricity. And that light and truth doesn’t obtain it’s meaning from the interpretations of man. Light and truth come from a source that is empirical: light and truth come from God.

Truth doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Truth is discovered and meaning is discovered from both the new information we receive and the previous information and experiences we have based on our unique perceptions, thoughts and feelings. More information doesn’t necessarily meaning more truth. The scriptures declare that there will be those who are “Ever learning but never coming to a knowledge of the truth.”

Like the strands and strands of Christmas lights, we link new knowledge to existing information. We add to our intelligence “line upon line, preceipt upon preceipt, here a little there a little”

We use sensory input in our thinking and learning. We plant and absorb information, ultimately giving meaning to it, but we have to first plant it.

Our thinking is layered. It occurs in our mind but can include our physical bodies and our feelings. Thinking, however, primarily involves language and visual images. They are intermeshed.

Personality influences our perspective and our learning. We have varying degrees of self-confidence. We have varying degrees of desire to think and to learn.

Motivation is an important and necessary component to planting , because motivation helps activate our sensory apparatus. People are motivated by external factors. People are also motivated, from within, by intrinsic motivations.

Thinking also occurs in context. We rarely isolate facts from the relevant situations and environments we discover them in. Thinking takes varying degrees of time to go over information, ponder, use, practice, and experiment with it.
Our collective thoughts, feelings, actions and experiences become our knowledge base. Knowledge is necessary for additional learning. Our knowledge base is the basis of our thought structure and meaning-making. The more we know, the more we can learn.

Our knowledge base becomes our mindset. We create a script and map based on what we know. Our point of view and perspective are based on that map or paradigm. Our paradigm becomes our information playlist, the filter we use to send and receive information and interpret our world around us.

New knowledge can be remembered more successfully when it can be tied to existing knowledge.

Growth and progression require continuous information upgrading. Our current mindset is a world view that acts as a filter to all incoming observations. Upgrading a world view takes willingness and work.

We can learn independently but we can also learn from others and by modeling behavior.

We upgrade by learning what we don’t already know. We learn from doing. Learning is especially powerful when we prepare something for others to see or hear. Visuals such as models, graphics, slides, or other activities which include participation, are very effective in changing our current mindset.

So next time your are looking at the Christmas lights on your Christmas Tree or driving by a wonderful light display, remember that each light represents an idea, and your collection of ideas are at the center of your own intelligence. You are what you think. You are like the strands of lights: the sum total of your thoughts, feelings, actions and experiences.