Because we already live with many scripts that have been handed to us, the
process of writing our own script is actually more a process of “rescripting,” or
Paradigm Shifting -- of changing some of the basic paradigms that we already
have. As we recognize the ineffective scripts, the incorrect or incomplete
paradigms within us, we can proactively begin to rescript ourselves.
I think one of the most inspiring accounts of the rescripting process comes
from the autobiography of Anwar Sadat, past president of Egypt. Sadat had been
reared, nurtured, and deeply scripted in a hatred for Israel. He would make the
statement on national television, “I will never shake the hand of an Israeli as
long as they occupy one inch of Arab soil. Never, never, never!” And huge
crowds all around the country would chant, “Never, never, never!” He marshaled
the energy and unified the will of the whole country in that script.
The script was very independent and nationalistic, and it aroused deep
emotions in the people. But it was also very foolish, and Sadat knew it. It
ignored the perilous, highly interdependent reality of the situation.
So he rescripted himself. It was a process he had learned when he was a
young man imprisoned in Cell 54, a solitary cell in Cairo Central Prison, as a
result of his involvement in a conspiracy plot against King Farouk. He learned to
withdraw from his own mind and look at it to see if the scripts were appropriate
and wise. He learned how to vacate his own mind and, through a deep personal
process of meditation, to work with his own scriptures, his own form of prayer,
and rescript himself.
He records that he was almost loath to leave his prison cell because it was
there that he realized that real success is success with self. It's not in having
things, but in having mastery, having victory over self.
For a period of time during Nasser's administration Sadat was relegated to a
position of relative insignificance. Everyone felt that his spirit was broken, but it
wasn't. They were projecting their own home movies onto him. They didn't
understand him. He was biding his time.
And when that time came, when he became president of Egypt and
confronted the political realities, he rescripted himself toward Israel. He visited
the Knesset in Jerusalem and opened up one of the most precedent-breaking
peace movements in the history of the world, a bold initiative that eventually
brought about the Camp David Accord.
Sadat was able to use his self-awareness, his imagination, and his conscience
to exercise personal leadership, to change an essential paradigm, to change the
way he saw the situation. He worked in the center of his Circle of Influence. And
from that rescripting, that change in paradigm, flowed changes in behavior and
attitude that affected millions of lives in the wider Circle of Concern.
joyce
(Joyce)
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