There are two well-known psychological phenomena that illustrate just how difficult it is for humans to properly understand themselves and the world around them: confirmation bias and its cousin, the backfire effect.
Confirmation bias speaks to our habit of cherrypicking information that supports our previously held beliefs and rejecting any evidence that runs counter to those beliefs.
The backfire effect is confirmation bias on steroids: the more we’re faced with evidence that we’re wrong, the more we dig in our heels. Overwhelming evidence leads to overwhelming resistance to that evidence. (This is why trying to convince someone of something is akin to arguing with a tree.)
In the world of psychology, these two cognitive biases are explained as threat defenses. Meaning that when our beliefs are challenged, WE feel challenged. The more deeply held or cherished the belief, the more threatened we feel.
All of which makes sense, of course, when you confuse your beliefs with who or what you are.
Cognitive Hand-Me-Downs
During our early years, the adult world spends a great deal of its time teaching, instructing, lecturing, and otherwise downloading what it knows so that we might know it too. We are praised and rewarded when we properly master these teachings and are criticized and punished when we do not.
Nowhere in this equation is it suggested that the child take such instruction with a healthy dose of skepticism. The adult instructors know the world is a mess, but that’s not going to stop them from indoctrinating the next generation into the same modes of thinking.
We compound things by depending on so-called experts who invest the majority of their lives immersed in obscure and arcane specialities. In the past these experts were tribal leaders, royalty, or religious figures; these days they can be recognized by the alphabet soup of honoraria that follow their names (PhD, MD, JD, CEO, etc.).
The only real difference between experts and you and I, are that when experts are wrong the damage is much greater (the general who leads his men to slaughter; the physician who comes up with the wrong diagnosis for a patient; the attorney who successfully condemns an innocent to the electric chair).
Remember that not so very long ago experts placed a flat earth at the center of the known universe; deemed women the property of men; sanctioned the torture and enslavement of entire populations; and bled, lobotomized, hacked and otherwise maimed the ill in search of a cure.
Surrendering Our Biases
Most of us are familiar with Socrates’s famous maxim about unexamined lives not being worth the effort. Yet across history, the vast majority of humans have blindly marched through life under the unexamined impulses of their own brand of cognitive biases.
These days our biases are on full display. Everywhere you look humans are blasting each other (with words and bullets) based on their skin color, politics, sex, gender, culture, ethnicity, etc. The more frightened we become, the more we take comfort in our beliefs. (Confirmation bias intensifies in times of confusion, threat, and chaos.)
So which truths, if any, might have stood the test of time? For me, it is the words of the sages and seers, owners of mystical experiences that transcend the known world. While human truths have some and gone, the words of the sages remain steadfastly consistent across time. They ‘felt’ right 3,000 years ago and they still feel right today. A flat earth, not so much.
There not only is a clarifying consistency in their teachings, but a sense that they are unlocking something deep within the heart and well beyond the limiting confines of the mind. And contrary to human modes of instruction, which depend on repetitive mental cogitation, their offerings become available only to the degree that we surrender our own ideas and biases. The more that we ‘die to this world,’ the more these offerings breathe a new and different life into us.
Or in the word of Robert Adams: “You have to surrender your ego, your pride, your concepts, your opinions, your questions, your answers – everything has to be surrendered and only then can the power that knows the way work its volition.“
I do not write these posts as someone who has ascended the mountain or tapped into a wellspring of eternal peace. Like others on this journey, I at times struggle, some days more than others.
But when I read or listen to the words from those mystical traditions, something unlocks within me. On a second and third and fourth reading, those same words reveal more and still more. It is akin to the parable of Jesus feeding the masses with just a few loaves and fishes. Miraculously, more and more springs from their words.
Conversely, the human-borne ‘knowledge’ planted in me as a child and perpetuated as an adult has too often left me hungry, lost, anxious.
And so maybe that’s why I write – to demonstrate that if someone like me can turn things around even a little, then there must be something to these mystical teachings. Trust me, I have had nothing to do with it.
