I.
You and Your World Pictures:
How Things Are and Work

Whoever aspires to understand man…must throw
overboard all immobile concepts
and learn to think in ever-shifting terms.
—Ortega y Gasset

John Psmith, consulting engineer, has come home after a day’s work at his office. He is sitting in his living room, idly leafing through the day’s paper, and relaxing. There is a cloud on the horizon of his mind. He has heard on the local news several times in the last few days that there have been a number of cases of meningitis in the neighborhood. He is worried about his four-year-old daughter who is upstairs. Should he, he wonders, have kept her home from nursery school until there was no more threat of an epidemic?

As he thinks about this, he hears the sound of the child crying. He gets up and begins to go up the stairs. He is suddenly terribly frightened. He mutters to himself,“Please, I’ll do anything, but don’t let Amy have meningitis. If it has to be, let it be me instead of her. She’s too small.”

It is plain that Psmith is praying. He is pleading with something outside of himself and even offering a bargain. We all understand what is happening. We might well do the same thing under similar circumstances.

Psmith is, at this moment, deeply sincere. He feels, thinks and acts as if he knows that there is something or someone to pray to and that results can be obtained by prayer. Where this entity is located is not a real question or a matter of any interest to Psmith.Distance, how far away this entity is, whether it be measured in inches or in light years, is not a factor in his perceptions. As a matter of fact,numbers simply do not apply to anything during the moments when it makes sense to Psmith to pray. The idea of measuring or numbering anything is simply not relevant.

This is a far cry from how Psmith perceived the world and reacted to it during his day at the office. The two world pictures are very different. As he sat at his desk he did not believe that wishes or prayer could change anything. He might wish deeply that the steel rods he is planning to use in the machine he is designing were stronger, but he is clear that no wish or prayer will make them so. There is simply nothing or no one“out there” to take note of his wishes, no matter how strong they are, and change the strength of the rods. If he wants stronger rods he will have to substitute another metal or another thicknes