beliefs
Reality is merely an illusion, although a very persistent one. . . Albert Einstein
Human intellect has evolved for survival not truth or accuracy. A quick tour of the history of political, religious or scientific ideas shows that almost any belief or view of the world is possible. We are capable of seeing or believing anything. Children tend to believe what they are told.
The number of people holding a belief, their age, status, education, emotional fervour or sense of certainty are no guarantee of its accuracy. Anything can be shoe-horned into an ideological frame of reference. Absurdities can become truths. The obvious invisible.
reality
Our only knowledge of the world is from the images it creates in our mind. We construct our world from these symbols.
Everything seems so real and so outside of us but it is all in our heads. Even the ideas of outside and inside are mental creations.
We are hard-wired to look for patterns in huge arrays of sensory impressions and construct images of separate objects and events from them. We are hardwired to resolve our memories and sensations into explanations or pictures. Just about any explanation will do, usually without testing or checking.
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How confident can we be that our perceptions represent what is really going on?
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Our picture of the world is formed from sensations projected onto living internal screens that are easily disrupted by injury, stress, drugs, sleep and degeneration.
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We draw information from sensations that we are not always conscious of, like the light and sound sensed by the skin.
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Impressions are stored all over the brain. They are changeable and not especially consistent with each other.
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Our recall of events is not picture perfect. It is constructed from fragments of recalled images elaborated and coloured by memories that rearrange themselves to fit the suggestions and expectations of others .
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We only really understand what previous experience has prepared us to see. Most of the rest is dimly registered or invisible.
How do we test the assumptions of the reality we share with others in our culture (our laws, science, religion, ideologies and customs) when everything we have done or seen since birth are based on them? How do we test the evidence of our senses after they have been filtered through those assumptions
consensus reality
Societies have a bit of independent thinking and activity but most is within the range of its consensus reality.
The myths and convenient truths we hold in common are the technology that provides the realisable mutual expectations that make it possible for us to live together.
We can now walk out the door without having to invest time and effort avoiding being eaten by our neighbours or devising ways to get to eat them. If our shared beliefs provide enough certainty we can build vast empires or take over the planet. Some tribal peoples have yet to discover this sort of consensus and lead what to us would be anxious lives with limited scope for joint ventures.
Our consensus view of the world is embedded in our language and culture. This is our folie à mille, our group psychosis. Sleepwalking in a cocoon of cultural beliefs. This saves us from having to establish common ground from scratch every time we meet someone but limits us to this shared world.
Humans are able to hold beliefs that don't line up with what they see with their own eyes. Reason can be suspended under financial or social pressure. Social and political truths can displace reality.
Resisting commonly held beliefs requires effort even if they are obvious nonsense. Particularly when wrong beliefs are rewarded with death or excommunication. The evidence of the senses can be filtered out of awareness or perception. Incongruities can be rationalised. This enables mass as mass social cooperation and mass folly.
Some beliefs defy gravity but promise wonderful and irresistible things. The more beliefs differ from the evidence of our senses the more time, effort and rituals needed to keep them afloat.
Many unquestioned beliefs and official stories about money, work, drugs, birth, learning, death, diet, relationships, health, God, politics and childrearing are misleading. They can be so taken for granted as to be unnoticed from within our day to day routines. Some erode our health, prosperity and happiness and limit what we could achieve.
cocoons
We each live within our own cocoon of beliefs. Many are contradictory and shift around with changing circumstances.
Beliefs determine what we think, see and do and tend to exclude incompatible ideas and experiences.
A system of beliefs requires constant reinforcement with reminders, rituals, rewards and sanctions. All available physical and intellectual resources may be needed to juggle and avoid evidence to the contrary.
Maintaining a belief system may be all consuming, even incapacitating but necessary to keep face, keep a sense of who one is and keep the approval of others. When seeing or thinking might lead to change they are avoided. Thus is change resisted.
awareness
Is it possible to escape the hypnotic thrall of conventions and think and see for ourselves beyond the propaganda, fiction, demonology, history and science set in three dimensional space moving through time?
The realities of starvation, loss, death, disease and war are powerful defoliants which cut through the neatly tended gardens of our beliefs to admit the light of reality to the otherwise obscure jungle of our underlying assumptions.
The exercises on the body intelligence and mind pages suggest some easier ways to get to the heart of things and experience what is really going on.
Awareness therapy is open to what we really think and experience a perhaps gets closer to what is actually happening.
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copyright (C) John Brasted 2008
updated 06/11/11
