Pride and Prejudice

by Jane Austen

Symbols & Color

• Palette: Artist Set (As is border and background)
• Target with a Bullseye: Goal Group
• Penny: Ordinal Cluster
• Diamond: Expressive Axis
• Color & Background: Violet

Implications of the Upright Position or Positive Pole:

The crossword puzzle represents our need to find precision and place into our categories descriptions or definitions which seems to ‘fit’ our available mental space. Discrimination emphasizes the discernment of differences, a sorting of things in contrast to something else. Yet, here no inherent better than less than distinction, merely a sharpness or dullness of personal classification (i.e. one recognizes the difference between an elephant and elephantiasis.) In this pole, this definition is consistent with modern science’s use of the term discrimination. The pencil and eraser symbolizes that nothing inserted into those spaces is neither fixed nor permanent and is often under rearrangement. Upon new information or refinement of experience, ideas can be modified or even completely erased. And when the boxes themselves are shifted, your context of evaluation changes as well.

All the great thinkers in the history of human knowledge (Intellectual Center Card 36) but not necessarily those who were Inspirational (Emotional Center Card 40), possessed a level of Discrimination assisting we humans to be more clear, accurate and precise about what we are considering as part of our spiritual, intellectual and emotional evolution.

Card messages in the  Illuminated position.

+ Discernment

Discerning, Precision, Refinement, Sophistication, Exclusive, Gourmand, Categorization, Specialization, Differentiation, Distinction

1. Show your expertise and sophistication. Demonstrate the refined temperament and knowledge of a specialist. Be meticulous. No one can do it quite the way you do.
2. Subtlety is only learned because of the power of discernment. Differentiating flavor, or texture, or nuance is a pleasure and a necessity of living. Take pleasure in being astute.
3. The ultimate power of the mind gives us the ability to make distinctions. Use this gift to divide the circumstances into more precise units. You will find gems inside. Divide and conquer.
4. A sophisticated person measures carefully their time, tastes, and appearance. Discern exactly what qualities you are looking for when you decide to make an investment in time, money, or another person.
5. Act like a connoisseur. Cultivate tastes like a gourmet. Evaluate like a critic. Present like an expert. These are forms of expression that set you apart from average, mundane, and pacified. 
6. Scrutinize something up close. You will see beauty in the subtlest details. But you will have to look closely!
7. If Discrimination is your Goal this lifetime, or pronounced in this circumstance, some lesson needs to be acknowledged and correctly identified, or clarified and refined. Are you doing so?
8. You’ve got it. Your precision is honed, your ability to present nuance at its best. Be the artiste’.
9. The whole process of Discrimination should illustrate the highly valuable skill of differentiation into classifications of kind, and ranges of degree, quantity and quality. Clarifying these variations gives one greater powers of discernment and thereby more informed decision making.
10. Evaluation and weighing considerations is the first step in decision making. Join with the skeptic, and be cautious and meticulous in scrutinizing the data. Then you will have the facts and you will better know how to proceed.
11. Context creates content! Apply the analytical question to make sure you are aware of the substrata of your viewpoint. Ask, “What does someone have to innately believe as true to accepted or do X?”
12. If you chisel away with small chips and groves, before you know it you’ll have developed your inner Michelangelo. Small refinements or tweaks are called for rather than wholesale changes.
13. What would you rather have the doctor use in heart surgery: a scalpel or a dinner knife? Every task has an optimum tool to perform it with. Get the best one you can find for this job.
14. You show ‘good judgment’ when you discern that some knowledge is not in your area of competency. Best to seek out a knowledgeable person or professional expert for details.

Quotes that characterize this pole…

• “Do not judge and you will never be mistaken.” ~Jean Jacques Rousseau
• “Sapere aude” is a Latin phrase meaning “dare to discern” – Immanuel Kant 
• “Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.” T. H. Huxley in Lay Sermons, 1870

Implications of the Reversed Position or Negative Pole

Sometimes, we completely miss our similarities in favor of the things, generally superficial, that make one different from another. These birds on a wire have been anthropomorphized to demonstrate a point. Race or ethnic hatred is a social bias toward a certain group because of fashion or pedigree, with a focus on the “otherness” increasing separation with undeserved scorn or praise. Such is the case in the negative pole of Prejudice. When the mind become clouded by the sensations of pleasure or pain (Moving Center Card 38) or the bias of historical emotional traumas or rewards, then in the negative pole, this goal is skewed to favor or reject on the basis that: like is good and difference is bad. What is often honed in upon are superficial distinctions to make oneself either better-than (superior and preferred) or less-than (inferior and rejected) in some hierarchy of power. Either way, prejudice is laced with stereotypic judgment, skewed assessment, and unnamed bias. But it the emotionally charged condemning or pedestalizing nature of Discrimination in this pole that produces an inaccurate attribution of qualities, negative or positive, to someone or something. Prejudice is an innate aspect or tribalism (Infancy Card 71) and thus has embedded within it the need to know your place in a hierarchy as to avoid rejection (banishment) and maintain acceptance (inclusion) within whatever group you identify with. Thus from this fearful motivation, one seeks all advantage to sustain themselves or their abilities as superior to someone else’s or establish an unwarranted positive bias (called the “Halo Effect”) where someone or thing or group is granted the status, “they are superior to me.”

Card messages in the Shadow position.

– Prejudice

(Judgmental, Opinionated, Bigoted, Prickly, Rejecting, Snobbish, Close-minded,  Exclusion, Banishment)

1. To be a victim of prejudice is to be judged less-than and rejected because of it. Placed in a hierarchy and rejected for being different. Is your judgment tainted by some bias? Are some facts being rejected?
2. Jean Jacques Rousseau said, “Do not judge and you will never be mistaken.” Good luck with that!  Stop pretending that you are NOT already deeply locked into disapproval of someone’s process. Use everything you have learned.
3. Of course you judge! The brain is wired to evaluate. The key question is: how does it serve your position? Can you, or the other person, be honest about the process and then move beyond it?
4. Rejection is usually a fear based response. Are you about to banish someone or something that is actually useful just because the way they show up is not to your liking? Careful. Be clear on the why and whether it might be needed?
5. Has someone hatched a sophisticated plot? Have you missed the subtlety currently operating? It is time for deeper scrutiny.
6. If you confuse the state of your inner world with the conditions actually present in the real world of life, it might be a wonderful fantasy or the most terrifying or aggravating nightmare. You bring your prejudices to bear without owning any of them. 
7. It seems that things are extreme. Time to exclude some options or people.
8. Repeating mistakes? Then you are NOT learning.
9. Be careful what prejudice persuades you to exclude. You might be throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
10. Ignoring, as in ignorance, is not the same as stupidity. Stupidity is usually a selection for one’s biases, believing them to be the truth, no matter what other facts might present. A choice to be made is confronting both elements. Wake up and stop ignoring.
11. Inuit peoples of the Northern Hemisphere, it has been documented, have invented many words to describe the subtly variations in the qualities of snowfall: whether it has high water content or low, icy and sharp or soft and molding; whether they can travel through it or if it would freeze them in their tracks. Their survival depends upon the correct identification and proper response to each variant. You would be well served to notice what things have been lumped together that actually function differently.
12. If you confuse the state of your inner world with the conditions actually present in the real world of life, it might be a wonderful fantasy or the most terrifying or aggravating nightmare. You bring your prejudices to bear without owning any of them.
13. Prejudice is to be placed in a hierarchy and judged less-than. A not-so subtle exclusion or marginalization is happening because of it. Show your quality and show bigotry out the door.
14. We call people of privilege “snooty”. It is interesting because those who ‘look down their nose at you’ are actually in the negative pole of this Overleaf. They rely on it for everything from sniffing fine wine to determining whether the flowers are fragrant or stink. No reason you can’t have a preference, just be careful not to make it a condescension.
15. In the extreme, your biases will lead you to reject some people or options. But when tempered from personal observation and experimentation they are called intuition. Just because it is a “judgment call” doesn’t mean it isn’t valid.
16. “None so blind as those who will not see.” Matthew Henry – Exclude at your own risk.
17. There are some fears that are rational. But you have to be rational in your assessment and not distorted in your evaluation of them. ‘Black or white’, either/or binary is the source of most misconception. In this circumstance, look out for those shade of gray; like in the wording of agreements, assessing of benefit or costs, but particularly in making sure you know what to look for.

Quotes that characterize this sentiment…

• “Preconceived notions are the locks on the door to wisdom.” ~Merry Browne
• “Small is the number of people who see with their eyes and think with their minds”. ~Albert Einstein 
• “When, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.” Carl Sagan
• “Denial of recognition, refusal of respect and the threat of exclusion have replaced exploitation and discrimination as the formulae most commonly used to explain and justify the grudge individuals might bear towards society, or to the sections or aspects of society to which they are directly exposed (personally or through the media) and which they thereby experience (whether firsthand or secondhand).” Excerpts of an interview by Italian author Giuliano Battiston with Zygmunt Bauman

Relevance in the Michael Teaching

As a Goal, Discrimination, originally called Rejection, requires the Personality to refine, by whatever means necessary its categorizations of things and experiences. In other words, this can be a process governed by well reasoned, thoroughly investigated, illuminated and sophisticated discernment; or it may be outright reductionism and emotional favoritism substituting personal prejudice as the mechanism for segregating experience.

The 2% of people who activate this goal as their primary learning directive may as a matter of course seem intellectual but by no mean all educated in an academic sense. More common of this goal are those who know a vast number of things about a specific subject. It might be that person knows the nuances of art, or engine repair, or biological processes, or the exact way to bake a perfect cake.  Subtle differences comprise all life and the advancement of the soul depends upon a periodic sorting of knowledge as to capture the deeper or richer meanings embedded therein.

In all the photo examples used here, you will notice an emphasis on the nose and thus the sense of smell.  Many persons who have chosen this Goal have a keen olfactory sense. It is an amplification of one of the oldest parts of the brain because there, a fundamental survival function resides: the differentiation and categorization of things we experience. This classification process can be very broad in early Soul Ages like: which foods are poisonous vs nutritious all the way to later stages of awareness where detecting the fine nuances of tone of voice may give us clues as the intention of other people. Even then, we react to pheromones which chemically signal many of those emotions are present. As one ages within a life, ‘tastes and preferences’ are formed by some unique calculus of an individuals genetics and environment. This process happens to all people and organisms to various degrees. The idea of a person having “refined tastes” as in some expression of social hierarchy, and thereby sophisticated, is a misunderstanding of language. It simple means that the degree to which a person has a narrowed or specific target for its desires, is all it means!

Reality is formed by our contextual understanding of it! With each stage of development, year of life, and each additional incarnation, a soul has the possibility of expanding or narrowing how they arrange their point of view and what it is. The Intellectual Center is developed because one becomes aware of nuance and accepts or rejects a unique categorization schema. In general, it is the process of recognizing, and then naming, what things are and how they relate to other similar things or experiences. The secondary benefit is that each successive round of comparison, scrutiny intensifies and making distinctions is often termed a level of sophistication. Those persons are commonly thought of as having discriminating tastes. This Goal is a quality woven into the fabric of the Artisan archetype. It helps them hone their precision at whatever task, skill or understanding they seek and express their creativity more abundantly. As a dimensional metaphor, think of one placing something in or out of a set, or classification, of things. For those who are already sophisticated in their awareness, you will recognize that our verbal construction of
the Overleaves is an exercise in precision categorization both seeking to quantify various aspects about existence (the kinds of thing), but also to qualify and compare those things in terms of degrees or order of intensity within a group of things.

When in the Shadow of this Goal, a person may if they commit themselves to being liberated from it, may utilize the paired opposite of this impulse is to drop the constricting parameters relinquishing it to Acceptance. Acceptance is inclusive and allows for variation and difference without the need to segment. It is the counterbalance for an overactive need to restrict or reject things that cannot be understood or controlled.

Cultural Meaning

Discrimination is a term used in two different context itself: as a highly emotionally charged word indicating social segregation and bigotry or a highly precise scientific term of the brains capacity to differentiate stimuli. Both tend to follow the trend of the negative and positive poles of the Overleaf above. Both involve separation and distinction.

When most people hear the word discrimination: prejudice, unfair treatment and exclusion, are the words often considered synonymous. They are not.  Discrimination means choosing distinguishing amongst similar objects because of minute differences is the talent of this aspect of human understanding. This latter description is how psychologists apply this concept to maturity and development of understanding.  Knowing the difference between love and infatuation, sex and true intimacy, inner power vs. outer dominance are keys in a person’s ability to make choices that are life affirming and in harmony with ones values.

Otherwise, as is the case with all person’s whose sense of “picky” specificity is based upon some unfulfilled need or fear of being wrong, the emergence of favoritism to the extreme of extermination. Being faced with a need, or in some cases obsession, which requires placing into “boxes”, ideas, beliefs and experiences then serve as a template for deepening understanding or codifying fears and reactions into well justified and preconceived notions.

Next in the Sequence of Goals

Once the Goal of Discrimination fulfills its function of separating things into perspective, those things that have been rejected don’t just go away. Acceptance is the next stage of work; coming to terms with the notion that exclusion of those ideas, things, people or circumstances from your mind doesn’t mean they go away in the world. Finding a way to coexist with aspects of reality you dislike is the purpose of the
next Goal of Acceptance.

You might have this Overleaf if…

1. I notice differences and want only the variety I want.
2. I am picky. Only a few things satisfy my sense of taste.
3. My preferences are specific and narrow.
4. My sense of smell and taste are particularly sensitive.
5. I can’t help but reject those things I do not like.
6. People are just different and many have lesser faculties to pay attention.
7. The best I can afford is all I want. Sometimes, even if I can’t afford it.

by Stephen Cocconi ©2011, Updated 2024

For a Motivations Cards Session or Channeled Consultation call: 209.768-4956 or email Stephen at channeling@themichaelteaching.com