editors note: “ The Cheese-less Tunnel” was an article published on the Internet and reposted on our Yahoo Group. We tried to find the original author to link to the article and could not. This has been modified to fit Star Wars. We did not write this.
“ Not to be aware of one”s feelings, not to understand them or know how to use or express them is worse than being blind, deaf or paralyzed. Not to feel is not to be alive. More than anything else, feelings make us human. Feelings make us all kindred.” -David Viscott
If you put a rat in front of a bunch of tunnels and put cheese in one of them, the rat will go up and down the tunnels looking for the cheese. If every time you do the experiment you put the cheese down the 4th tunnel, eventually you‘ll get a successful rat. The rat knows the right tunnel and will go directly to it every time.
If you move the cheese out of the 4th tunnel and put it at the end of another tunnel, initially the rat will still go down the 4th tunnel and of course will get no cheese. He will then come out of the tunnel, will look the tunnel over to make sure it‘s the right tunnel, and will go right back down the cheese-less 4th tunnel again. Unrewarded, he comes out of the tunnel, looks the tunnel over, goes back down the 4th tunnel again, but finds no cheese.
The difference between a rat and a human being is that eventually the rat will stop going down the 4th tunnel
The difference between a rat and a human being is that eventually the rat will stop going down the 4th tunnel and will look down the other tunnels, but a human being will keep on going down the cheese-less tunnel forever. Rats are only interested in the cheese, but human beings care more about going down the traditionally correct and ‘right‘ tunnel.
It is ‘Belief‘ which allows human beings to go down the fourth tunnel ad nauseam. They go on doing what they have learned to do without any real reward, without satisfaction, and without any nurturing, because they have come to ‘believe‘ that what they are doing is right and correct. And they will do this forever without any reward, without any cheese, as long as they believe in it and can prove that they are in the ‘right‘ tunnel.
People will do this with their religions, relationships, careers, etc. People ‘think” they are doing what is right but they don‘t always test their ‘feelings‘. We need to be in touch with our inner selves to make sure that we are not going down a cheese-less tunnel right now in our lives.
