Thanksgiving was, and is excellent.
It was the pinnacle of the year, where I gathered to see friends and family, enjoy wonderful food, company, and activities. It truly is how life should be lived.
It is tremendously difficult, falling down from those feelings of greatness into what life unfortunately is, for some reason.
If you had the power to make someone happy, and it wouldn’t cost you anything, or change the way you life your life, would you do it? If you wouldn’t, I’d love the know the reason why you’d wish suffering on any human beings, and if you need someone to talk to you about who hurt you in your life such that you want others to hurt, I can help you find someone.
It’s almost tragic, no not almost, but is tragic, how we can be so jovial, lighthearted, and together, and not more than three or four days later, everything returns to the miserable way it was, and for no good reason.
The world must turn? We must toil and prepare for Christmas. What if, no one made gifts? What would you do then? How would you show your appreciation to your family? Why, without gifts, it’s almost like Christmas would be like Thanksgiving. It’s tragic indeed how our society and our upbringing convince us that longing for material goods is a good thing.
I had a brief discussion this Thanksgiving with my father, because he had loaned me the movie Circle of Iron which he said was a formative film for him in his youth. I was curious and had to ask, how formative it must’ve been, when the film presents strong zen philosophy, in that a man cannot possess himself, so how can he hope to possess anyone or anything? As well as the inevitable truth that the only place we need to find answers are within ourselves. Money certainly doesn’t come from ourselves, so I had to ask.
He said he believed himself to be a mix of both zen and modern consumerism philosophy, but I couldn’t really understand that. Contradictions in our world don’t exist, I believe in that saying, thus one of his propositions must be false.
I’m not here to bash my father. I’ve learned a lot from my parents over the years, and I’m at a point in my life where I’ve learned enough to ask the hard questions. The ones it seems no one wants to hear, or answer. I made a statement, or claim about how we could change the world for the better and one of my cousins said that it wasn’t worth talking about because it was impossible (or at least extraordinarily unlikely). But if we don’t talk about the impossible, how would we ever have made it to the moon? Developed The Internet? Explored unseen corners of the Earth?
Someone has to start by talking about that which everyone around them believes to be impossible, and through willpower and understanding, it becomes possible. This is a big motivator in my writing. I know it all sounds crazy, a world without money, where people work but don’t get paid? You can’t imagine it because you’ve never experienced or learned about anything different. The closest thing most people can conjure is communism which has a sour taste to many mouths, and is just as far away from what I’m talking about as democracy is.
I also learned over the weekend, that even a group of intelligent people, do not understand how statistics work. This gave me great insight into how easily advertisers, large companies, proponents of evil, are able to manipulate human beings on a massive scale. Many of us simply don’t understand what we’re being told.
There is a concept in psychology, called the ways of knowing. It is the scale upon which we determine that the method by which we have learned something is actually reliable and accurate in the information we are allegedly learning. The scale is as follows, from least reliable and accurate, to most:
1. Intuition. We claim we know something because of how it made us feel, our “gut reaction”, or our innate human sense of the world. While this is ranked as the most unreliable way of knowing, I do believe there are cases where perhaps human intuition has an edge, although with all the ways we’re dulling our own senses, this method is waning in efficacy, and in many cases does deserve to be ranked as generally unreliable. The one caveat to this method, is belief in a higher power. I have heard, read, and been witness myself to instances and events where it seems so highly improbably that it occurred by chance, that there must be something. We also lack an understanding of what truly lies beyond death, and beyond life (the, “who/what created the big bang” and “how did the universe come to be” questions), thus, given that we should not rely upon the other methods to provide something innate to human existence (spirituality, which by definition is not scientific in nature), we can allow our intuition to best guide us in this manner.
2. Authority. This is how most of us learn through our adolescence, and is the greatest source of “brainwashing”. We claim we know something because someone in a position of power told us it was true. The earliest cases of this, are our parents, from whom we learn our foundations of being a human. Most fortunately, my parents did teach me to be thoughtful, and inquisitive. Another source of authority is our teachers in school, from whom we learn much of our “facts” about the world. This method is largely unreliable because at an early and impressionable age, we can told such things by those who love us most that “that man is bad because of the color of his skin”, or “those two women shouldn’t get married.” And instead of having any other basis of understanding, we believe them. (My parent’s told me the opposite of those, but I used them as evocative examples). Most adults learn much of their information through this source (amazingly, despite it’s unreliability) through the institution we know as, The News.
3. A Priori, or more commonly known as Rationalism. If we believe we can think of a reason why something is, then it must be true (until evidence is provided against it, that we can understand, and/or accept). One of the earliest examples of this being a poor way of knowing, is that when we begin to explore our solar system, human beings believed that the sun revolved around the earth. We appear to be stationary, and that ball of fire moves around us each day, so we must be at the center. We know now, thanks to way of knowing number 4, that we are not in fact at the center of our solar system. This method is “fine” but many things can be explained and not truly understood, or that different people explain and rationalize things in different ways. Why do you go to work for 40+ hours a week, when way of knowing 5, our most reliable way, has demonstrated that is bad for human beings? Is it to provide for your family? Is it to better yourself as a human being? These are not reliable ways of knowing why you do what you do. Even your own behavior is not best understood this way.
4. Empiricism. Through empiricism, you might say that you know something because you have seen and observed it to occur. This way of knowing is most likely how “flat-earthers” explain their opinion, in that they have only ever perceived earth to be flat. Our past experiences often interfere with this way of knowing as well. While it is better to see and experience something yourself to understand it, we do not live in a vacuum where one experience can account for all possibilities. This is why openness to experience is so important for human life. We need to be able and willing to experience things that will change our perspective, opinion, or understanding. If you believe in something so wholeheartedly that you will never change your mind about it, you are ignoring probability, and thus your belief is more harmful to you than helpful in the longest term.
5. The Scientific Method. The most reliable and accurate way of knowing something, is by examining it systematically, using an agreed upon set of practices that we are all taught by our teachers at an early age. This is interesting, because this way of knowing relies upon us learning it, in method 2, which is unreliable in itself. Thus, making use of this in our own lives, and examining the information that others have learned by using this method, is the best way to apply this way of knowing. We cannot always make use of this method, because it has been limited by Authority, how we use time and how much money we are given, depending upon our interests. Many systems of the world work against this method, because utilizing it reduces the power of authority, of logic, and creates knowledge that is difficult to argue, lest you can provide a methodically created counterpoint, which again relies heavily on time and money.
By the nature of the way that we understand how human beings come to know things, it is difficult to know things at higher, more reliable levels. The system and world, want us to be ignorant so that, most commonly, authority, can “tell us what we need to know.” By my sharing this with you this morning, I hope that you have gained some degree of understanding that how we come to “know” things, is not always as reliable as we might believe.
I began this post, rejoicing that I was able to experience Thanksgiving, and life, as it should be for a least a few days. I was, and still am, quite sad, that we live according to all that we have learned by authority. I wrote so much about it, because it helps me feel better to provide people a bit of method 5, so that perhaps others can begin to ask the challenging questions that no one seems to want to hear, or answer. By attempting to live my life according to way of knowing 5, and on occasion the undeniable force of method 1 (feeling great love, for example), I can find some speck of inner peace this morning.
I’d like to write more poetry this week, in the hopes of someday soon being able to publish for sale a small collection. Perhaps all this today will help me free myself of the strain I experienced as I fell from the height of the holiday, back down to the depths of day-to-day existence.
I will leave you reader, with this haiku:
Question, and think of
how you have come to know it,
all that you have learned.
