Core Assumptions and Principles: 24. All of our perceptions and experiences are filtered through our conceptualizations about the world.

500 words a day project

DAY 1:

Human beings experience the world around us through our senses but the senses only provide large amounts of raw stimuli to our brains. So must stimuli that it would be completely overwhelming and incomprehensible if it were not filtered and organized on a subconscious level. The unconscious mind filters the stimuli of the senses through the preconceptions and expectations of prior experience and logic in order to present the conscious mind with a comprehensible image of the external objective world. This of course simplifies our interactions with the world but it also has the potential to lead to mis-perceptions and misunderstandings as we perceive that which fits our preconceptions and expectations rather than that which is actually there. More than this though we fail to improve our understanding of the world because we do not allow ourselves to use new data to amend our existing conceptions and understanding. We miss the particulars of reality and experience things not as they are but only as we believe they should be.

Part of the reason for our conceptualization of the world around us, beyond the need to simplify our experiences, is the human development of language. Language connects words to objects and experiences which also furthers our ability to make connections and develop complex ideas which do not correspond to any external reality but only to the words used to derive them. This is of course incredibly positive but it also has negative effects... because we connect to the word rather than the actual object we frequently miss the truth contained in the object and in the direct experience of it. We live solely within our mental images alienated from the objective reality they represent.

But it is also important to recognize that the words we use and the conceptualizations to which they refer are not separate from the objective reality but are derived from it. Words and conceptions even when they are learned through abstract instruction or developed through abstract thought are originally founded in direct experience of the world around us. Everything no matter how synthetic or abstracted must find its original source in experience of the world outside of ourselves. We do not create anything entirely from within without deriving it from the source material of experience. First we must as babies accept the overwhelming constant stream of the world around us completely incomprehensible and frightening. But we are not completely without tools, we are not purely blank slates. Our brains come into the world with the necessary structures to allow us to begin to make connections and filter the information bombarding us into the first basic concepts and words which we eventually begin to use to communicate with those around us, and they in response communicate back to us and reenforce our practice of conceptualizing and begin to hand down to us their own conceptualizations. This is a necessary and natural practice, but it also contains the opportunity to do great harm, in the form of passing along the misconceptions which cripple generation after generation. We give to our children the necessary tools to understand and survive in the world that surrounds them, but we also give to them our mistakes and oversimplifications.

It is a necessary action to begin to de-conceptualize our experiences to free ourselves to access the direct experience of the world around us unmitigated by deep seated conceptualizations. We need to learn to experience the world as it is to reveal the truth free of received error.