“Besides love and sympathy, animals exhibit other qualities connected
with the social instincts which in us would be called moral.”
- Charles Darwin
And now, after some musings on cognitive dissonance and cognitive bias, complaining
about the worth we give to opinions, said or heard, and its consequences, to
where this lead us?
It should, at least to some extent, lead us to an open field of
acceptance and as the field itself, openness. This, because who we are is so
hard to fathom, reach and preserve and why is it so hard? Perhaps it is because
who we say we are is a dynamic flexible idea resting on a balance between the
silence of Self and our interaction with a given environment? A question that
is resolved in a common advice for many decades, if you don’t know who you are,
travel, read, explore, be and adventurer in your own life.
And so it happens that a lost soul travelling to Tibet finds itself as
much as any struggling human going to the tavern with his misery and meets a
prophet have both experienced the existence of anchors, solace and meaning in
that very moment, no matter its duration.
The meeting with meaning happens
all the time, if we just stay a little bit open and loose a bit our conviction
of our opinions and approach it all with interest like fools, dancers, saints
and adventurers in a life we make around a silent core that works on subtle resonance
and dissonance.
Philosophers over centuries have perceived the human being as a beast,
an angel, a demon, corrupted and fallen, something fated by nature, a bridge
between heaven and earth, a link crossing all kingdoms. So many opinions of what
we are…
And perhaps the solution lies in this field of contrast and opinion,
because the human being is as it is from birth flexible, curious and open – and
then enters society with its conditioning. And what is conditioning? It is
about how the organism is getting disposed to understand punishment and reward
in a given way. Certainly, corporal punishment is unpleasant for any organism,
but in this field we speak of a realm of experience and response that is not
really touching Self, but Self as an social actor.
My point is; it is so easy to get lost in the world. We are saturated
all the time with opinions, information, judgment and taste. So how can we
understand who we are?
We are naked souls that during life is clad with various vestments that
we at some point claim to be who we are, in the sense of representing who or
what we are. I believe this naked soul holds imprints that are stimulated and
challenged in the walk of life, and so friend and foe all works to make us all
understand better who we are, by
resonance and dissonance.
In this something curious
happens, many of us are still seduced by the foe, and this shows itself in
ardent defense of Self, belongingness and opinions. If we were organisms living
in conformity with the laws of physics a resonance would make us draw together
with what pulls in as dissonance would make us pull back and avoid to engage.
But apparently it is not like this; rather a field of contrast is established. In
the far extreme of this we find any form of fundamentalism in how it gives
purpose to the lost Self by bringing cause, and if the cause is greater than
what we comprehend even greater is our collapse and acceptance.
When this happens we lose our humanity, our bestial instincts and become
organisms, victims for any breath and force that might condition us in
embracing cause and temporal identity in place of the soft whispers of Self,
that quiet voice in the path.
A cause is quite simply something of a sentimental power that provokes
emotions in relation to present itself as something altruistic. It can be
anything from animal rights to boko haram, point being it is always about a
sentimental seduction and as sentimental and emotional organisms this is also
the avenue we use to know the world, and hence we can be convinced to be what
we are not by the same route we realize who we are.
We are confusing resonance and dissonance, belonging and alienation by
an overarching ideal that teaches us that we can be whatever we want to be,
hence the dissonance turns into a negative gateway to a field of wasted time…
What happened to the Self in these instances?
Quite sadly, the more time we invest in something the harder it is for
us to let it go, it be a conviction, religion or relationship, so time invested
in dissonance can therefore be adopted as an active part of Self, whilst it was
in truth only a cul-de- sac and detour for something else, a lesson and not
meaning as it reveals itself in blessings on the path where we find resonance.
This bias is rooted in our saturated world and perhaps we should question
if not a saturated world of ambition and struggle is something we need to be
aware exists in order to become Self-aware. Perhaps we can only become
Self-aware if we are given the necessary time to digest all this information
and reassess our position and where we are – in this way living life is like
any other journey – constant crossroads and the choices we make generates the
field of resonance and dissonance that help us to the true to Self.
This difficulty in finding Self, our attention to the voice on the Path,
that will always be our own, is made complicated by our current preference of
rulership and social organization that demands that your ‘true Self’ is also
adequate, useful and beneficial to an enormous global community. We have today
democracy as ideal, and what is this about? It is something very smart. It is
about counting heads and allows the majority to have its voice heard. If the
majority is educated, kind and loving, this is a good thing, but if these
factors are absent and the community gets to numerous in amount of participants
we are faced with a dance and battle of voices and opinions. At worst the
democratic ideal becomes a joke, at best an agreeable frustration. No matter
how much democracy is nice as an ideal it also calls upon our attention all the
time, to make decisions in matters we are interested in or not, as participants
of a society. Somehow, we get lost in commonality and community and the more we
engage the less we hear of that voice that calls Self to reflect on its
surroundings. It is only natural, the bigger the world gets, the greater the
field we traverse becomes and thus to retract becomes an act of slow death.
It is in this field what we know as moral is developed, and contemporary
moral is rooted in opinions and social efficiency, not Self. Contemporary moral is about codes of behaviour
and opinion that is allowed by society – and no matter how rebellious you think
you are, this dissonance is invited into the common field of moral constitution,
as a contrast to what is decided for you. And so, you are allowed to be angry
and being hard and strong in your opinions, because the normative society has
allowed it. This would suggest that our surroundings are important for us to
address in order to start to give ear to the voice on the path, that voice
rising from Self that establish you as Unique in relation to something and as
within something. The true rebel, the true seeker will always step outside, to
the outskirts of the world, or to a mountain, real or figuratively, where he
will find perspective and in this stepping out, death of opinions and
convictions in favour of solace and understanding is bound to happen. And so
starts the resonance with Self.
When Henry David Thoreau left the world in favour of the woods it was
clearly about a search for Self in the absence of social voices and opinions he
was searching and in this he found Nature as force of his conditioning and in
this he found freedom in dreams and dreams in life meeting one another as he
realized by the quiet predictable pace of Nature who he was.
Certainly I have found Thoreau’s remedy to be my own medicine, but this
also questions the health of our world and if the engaged social participant is
really who he or she believes itself to be…
So, perhaps to become aware of the voice in the path that calls upon
Self starts with becoming aware of the forces that bind together the socio-political world we live in, not for the sake of agitation against its unjust
ways, but to understand how a world like ours makes us obedient and weak, even
in the fight against what suppresses, because force against force will always be
an increase of what is and what we don’t want. There is always another way to
escape the claws and fangs of a world that seeks to seduce us into slavery and
that rests in ceasing giving power to the tyrants and instead search the voice in
the path that gives power to Self. And sure, no man is an island by itself, but
by realizing the nature of the island we are we can perhaps start to get an
idea of who we are disconnected from the rulers of the world… and question if
we are entertaining resonance or dissonance and in this if we are giving power
to Self or to a fluctuating identity that at some point will cease to be, one
way or the other…