mawstools said:
Powerful video! I wish the major media outlets in the US would run this on their front pages, Nellie. Thanks for finding this and posting it.
Conventional Western education is grounded in the notion that seeing is believing. The scientific method stands in this idea. The best we can do is observe and test our hypotheses. And an hypothesis is, itself, a belief. So we are running around in circles, no matter how hard we try to do otherwise.
In my personal experience, it is terribly difficult to break through beliefs we have been handed by people with greater social power than we have. Something fundamental in the human psyche connects us, one to the other, and we need each other to create whatever it is we call “meaning.” A sense of meaning is very hard to sustain alone. To question something requires the mind to put itself alongside something else, and that can be quite uncomfortable. Exciting, sometimes, but not comforting.
I live, right now, in a place where I would describe more than half the population as very like this young woman. Sharing her inability to question “new age” beliefs. I often find myself feeling “outside” this tiny community, even while I am located here, because I enjoy many new age ideas, but I don’t believe in them anymore and people can sense that.
Earlier in my life, I was surrounded by Christians who couldn’t question their fundamentalist beliefs. During that same time, I was immersed in a working community of people who couldn’t question the notion of themselves as “objective” investigators of the truth (reporters). Earlier than that, I grew up surrounded by people who couldn’t question the validity of “academic” authority, or behaviorism or the allopathic model of medicine. And so forth…
What I have learned lately, from cognitive and neuroscientists, and from my own practice of meditation, is that the mind itself is always fabricating its own meaning from perception … and so I can only see what I already believe.
This makes me responsible for every aspect of my experience, even the aspects I think I don’t like. This, too, is an interesting belief to investigate.
Without my meditative practice, I am unable to investigate things. My mind gets too chaotic and then fear overwhelms cognition.
Thanks for this opportunity to reflect on all this. I’m very curious now about what others will have to say…
