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Reflections: Theological Memoirs #5

Reflection Number 5: The World we Create

 
This is the Fifth in a series of articles that examine nine “scientific facts” that require a new theological response.

Read First Article: What we can Know about the Universe
Read Second Article: Homo Sapiens, God, and the Evolving Universe
Read Third Article: From the Very Big to the Very Small
Read Fourth Article: Undeserved Suffering
 
Reflection Number 5: The World we Create
 
In an earlier reflection we looked at the question “who am I?” from an evolutionary perspective. Who am I relative to Neanderthals, and what will I (the species) become a millennium or two down the road? For the next few essays, I want to again raise the issue about who we are, but now from more of a psychological point of view. There are laboratories that examine peoples’ behavior, but the conclusions are not as “hard” as looking at stars through a telescope or measuring distance. Examining the operation of our own consciousness is not definitive, and that makes it difficult to separate fact from commentary, as I have previously done, so henceforth there will be no formal separation.

We don’t wake up every morning asking ourself who am I? But every once in a while, it’s not a bad idea, because it is a good question. There are variations of the question who am I? Such as, where do I find meaning? what’s the key to my happiness? am I free to turn my life around if I want to? how aware am I, really? These are complex issues that have occupied some of the best minds for millennia, and to the best of my knowledge, have not arrived at one universally accepted answer. Inasmuch as we are all different, the answer to the questions will be unique to us. What follows, then, will not be the answer to the questions, but suggestions as to how we can frame the questions.

I believe that there are at least four guideposts, or subsidiary questions, that can guide our investigation, and these will be the substance of the next four reflections. Those of you who know me well will recognize some familiar themes. First, to what extent am I blinded by my own ego? Second, what is going on when I on occasion find myself “in the zone”? Third, how do other people help me answer the question about who I am? And lastly, with what do I fill my life? No doubt there are myriad other dimensions to our life, but these will form a good place to start. Look back at each question and focus on it for a minute. See what comes to mind.

Let’s start with the first question, about our ego. I want to talk about what we normally think of as egotism and parochialism, but without all the extra baggage associated with these words, if that is possible. The expanding universe is a fact. Evolution is a fact. Unjust suffering is a fact. The level of certainty is definitely lower, but I do want to assert that egotism is also a fact. I use it not in the sense that we are selfish, or greedy, or uncaring, but rather in the sense that we each create our own little world where we feel safe, and from which we analyze and understand reality. Most of us like to believe that we are open-minded and reasonable, but, as the bumper sticker says, don’t believe everything you think. It might just be your ego taking over.

Our brain creates order out of chaos

You and I are born into the world in a definite time and at a particular place, and in the course of life we all have a set of experiences that is unique to us. Seems pretty obvious. From the moment when our consciousness begins to develop, our antennae to the environment are registering sensations of all sorts. As the information bombards us, our brain begins to classify and organize what previously was scattered and disjointed. It reaches out, engages the information coming from the “outside”, and takes an active role in creating order out of chaos.

The net result of this process is that, as time goes on, I develop my own “frame of mind”. This frame of mind is quite encompassing in its reach and activity; it is not passive, as though the brain were a blank piece of paper upon which sensation writes its message. It is active. Our frame of mind is a pattern whereby new experiences are analyzed, functioning as a filter through which approaching sensations and ideas must pass. This filter is a network of presuppositions, anticipations, memories and patterns that give shape and order to all incoming sensations. Of course, our frame of mind is affected by what we learn from the outside world. Sometimes the impact can be such that our perception of reality changes, and sometimes we utilize new experience to strengthen and reinforce what we already believe, right or wrong.

Perception is distorted

This interpretive filter is unique to the individual. I got mine and you got yours. People may have comparable experience and may agree on many things, but no two such filters are identical. We each see the world through spectacles that cast a certain hue to reality. We can never be assured that we know anything the way it really is, but only as it appears to us. And the way it appears to us is partly determined by what we are able to see, what we want to see, and what we don’t want to see. As a result, our perception of everything is at some level distorted. Information constantly bombarding us is to some degree made to fit into certain pre-arranged patterns of interpretation, patterns shaped by our very limited experience. This happens whether we are aware of it or not.

We can summarize this process by saying that we all create our own world and crown ourselves king or queen. We shape reality into what we want it to be, making the world out there fit our expectations as best we can. Inasmuch as we all do this, we all live in different worlds. The process is not deliberate; it just happens. We all view the world through particularly shaded sunglasses, and we don’t even know it. A friend once gave me a pair of sunglasses with windshield wipers. Hint taken.

A natural process

This organizing function of the brain is a most natural process. As do most living creatures, we try –and need- to organize our environment, making the pieces fit together in some kind of order. We seek wholeness where there is fragmentation. We crave and also require structure in our life. We don’t want to live in a disjointed universe, where things don’t fit. There is no evil intent: organization along with the accompanying distortion seems to be just a natural process.

We add interpretation to fact

In this process, there is a dialogue between the initial event and the interpretation of that event. The second the interpretation is added to the event, well…it’s just like putting on that pair of sunglasses. What we see is no longer what is necessarily out there, but rather a combination of the event and our interpretation of it. This is how we become blind to our own relativity. It is extremely difficult for us to realize that our interpretation of the event is not actually part of the event itself.

Location in time affects senses

This difficulty appears even at the most basic level of sensation. If we are subjected to the same sensation over and over again, our reaction to it will decline. The strength of the registering synapse diminishes with repetition. Hold something in your hand long enough, and you soon become unaware of its presence. Our location in time clearly affects our sensory capability.

Location in space affects senses

The same is true with respect to our location in space. Take a gray square and surround it with white on the one hand, and surround it with black on the other, and note that the brightness of the gray square will seem to change, depending on whether it is surrounded by white or by black. You and I might argue about the color of the gray square, when in fact it’s the same color but we’re looking at different backgrounds.

So the spatial location of the origin of a sensation, as well as the repetition of that sensation through time, affects how it registers with us. The fact is that I am here and you are there. You are experiencing the event from one coordinate in the space-time continuum, and I from another. We might assume that we would have identical experience of the same event, but we do not. Not even on the level of basic sensation.

Kant’s categories of space and time

Emmanuel Kant was one of the first philosophers to warn us that we don’t experience reality as it is in itself (German: ding-an-sich), and that all we have is our experience of it. It was Kant also who first told us that there are two “categories” that the mind brings to sensation- those of space and time. Modern psychology, in analyzing the sensory process, is confirming what Kant hypothesized centuries ago: simple sensation is subject to different registerings in different minds with regard to differences in space and time. The spatial and temporal location of both the observer and the observed impact the observer’s experience. You and I don’t see the same thing.

Perception interprets data even more

The difficulty of separating our experience of an event from the event itself is also apparent if one considers perception. Sensation tells us something is red. Perception adds to it the shape, and now calls it an apple. In perception, we organize data, throw in some past experience, and come up with something we can deal with. And, as always, what we come up with depends on who we are.

Memory, confirmation bias, repression and defense mechanisms

There are many other insights from psychology that offer warnings about concluding that our perception of reality is totally accurate. Memory, for example, is quite selective. The past is reconstructed with great distortion, especially when encouraged by a group. It was a horse! It was a mule! (Fiddler on the Roof). How long was that fish you caught? Because remembering is not a simple process, it is against judicial propriety to lead the witness, for in leading the witness, the question supplies a piece of information that had not yet been established. The prosecutor may say something like, “Tell me about the man who was walking down the street”, when it had not yet been established that it was a man, but only a person. If the witness is led into assuming that is was a man, then the reconstruction of the past will indeed begin to work with the concept of a man. It wouldn’t be long before the witness would swear on a stack of bibles that it was a man walking down the street.

And then there is a process called confirmation bias. This refers to the fact that we are always seeking to support and give credence to what we already believe, and that we very seldom look for evidence that will prove us wrong. We want to be confirmed in what we already believe because we have that innate tendency to bring order out of chaos, and not chaos out of order- whether it be wrong or right.

Lastly, Freud has shown that all of us go through life with defense mechanisms. One of these is repression. Oftentimes we cannot deal with our relationships with other people, and rather than allowing our life to become disrupted, we push these difficulties down into our subconscious. Such repressed feelings and emotions are always with us, whether we realize it or not, and mostly, we do not. We come to reality not only with our conscious mind, but with our subconscious as well, quite active and filled with all sorts of presuppositions and attitudes. We bring a hidden agenda to every event, an agenda of which we are unaware.

A second defense mechanism is rationalization. We already know what we want to do, so we very creatively dream up “reasons” why it’s the right thing to do, even though there may be no just cause for believing and acting as we do. Rationalization is the opposite of reasoning, which is logical. Rationalization is illogical, but takes on the façade of reason.

So, from all these examples, from pure sensation which one would expect to be free from distortion, to defense mechanisms at the other end of the spectrum, which are obviously filled with distortion, we have evidence over and over again, that we do not realize that we are relative to our own history.

Finally, these processes clearly happen on a social as well as an individual level. If it is true that we all have our own shade of sunglasses, it is also true that various hues can be grouped into reds, grays, yellows, etc. Persons who share a culture are apt to have more in common with each other than they would with persons from another culture. The same is generally true of those who share the same class, status, role, or gender. Groups share perceptions of reality, despite the fact that each person will see it uniquely.

A rather fundamental question presents itself: although all this may be true, is it only half the story? We all know that we have changed our minds, have grown, that we respect the opinions of at least some others, and, to a certain extent, realize our own shortcomings.

Even in Protestant theology, the concept of justification, the initial awareness of god, is followed by sanctification, the process of growth in that awareness. So all is not egotistical. Or is it? I really don’t know. We all seem to grow in our consciousness, but it also seems that we never reach the end of that process. There’s always another dimension of our egotism that needs to be rooted out. As a practical guide, it’s probably best to assume that we are indeed parochial and egotistical, and work as best we can to root out the blindness.
 
Read Sixth Article: A Zone by Any Other Name
Read Seventh Article: How Other Persons Affect Us
Read Eighth Article: Who am I?
 

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