The content of this post can be summed up as follows: Our identity shapes how we filter and process information.
This post will be the foundation of much of what I am going to talk about, as I’m trying to make sense of the world.
Let’s start with an example that is a hot topic these days: The term “conspiracy theory” will mean two completely different things to a person who sees him/herself as a down to earth voice of reason that sees through nonsense, and someone who sees him/herself as a truthsayer who sees through the lies of the establishment. And depending on our identity, we will handle information related to the label completely differently.
I gladly confess that I belong more to the latter category and I in no way believe that I’m exempt from these biases (even though I think, for the sake of humility, it’s probably a good thing to stay away from the label “truthsayer”). What makes me believe that I at least have truth a little more on my side than the down-to-earth guy, is that I know for an absolute fact that the world is much more than we can perceive with our five senses. And no debating in the world is going to change this fact.
So, this is the situation we find ourselves in: We only have access to a limited amount of input regarding a certain situation or phenomenon. We seldom have access to anything that even comes close to resembling the whole picture. And our identity, rather than cold objective reason, plays a huge part in what input we choose to discard and what we take to heart.
Other factors that play huge parts in what we take in, that have no relevance to what is actually true, are how things are being said, what emotional state we are in when the information is presented to us, in what context it is presented, in relation to what other information it is presented and how present we are while we perceive it. To name a few things. But let’s stick to identity here.
People will also be uncomfortable when we act contrary to our identity, which adds a social aspect to it, where it’s not only us, but the people around us, that help keep us fixed to a certain way of being, which includes how we filter and process information.
As long as we primarily use our intellects to try and make sense of the world, we will be subject to these limitations.
I don’t know an easy way out of this. The best solution I can come up with, is to cultivate other faculties that we can use to make sense of the world. These would be faculties of perception such as intuition and the ability to sense energies, so that we can get a feel for the energy behind for example a statement. But the danger here, is that we are so used to using our intellects to comprehend the world, that the other faculties are very poorly developed. But this can be changed by practice.
So while developing these faculties, we need to be careful not to fall prey to the temptation of adopting an equally false worldview, when we have been given sufficient reasons to discard the worldview of the majority. Which we will, once we start to question it, while letting go of the idea that reality has to be more or less the way we perceive it, together with fear of ridicule that comes from believing things that many would consider as crazy. When we understand beyond any reasonable doubt, that “down to earth” is the real madness.
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