And in the end…..
We live and see life in accordance with our worldview.
And what is our worldview? How is it built?
It is built from our assumptions.
What are our assumptions?
They are decisions we made, both consciously and subconsciously, about how the world around us functions, and about how we fit into that….. basically, our assumptions are about “me, and the world”.
Our Non-Verbal Base System
From birth, our assumptions come from two sources.
The first is our direct experiencing of everything outside our skin.
What we see, what we hear, what we smell, what we taste, what we touch.
Added to that, our assumptions rise from what our reactions to those sensory things we experience.
Very quickly following our birth, the second source, is how our family/teachers/heroes teach us, about how our experience is to be interpreted.
In actuality, our senses are our direct experiencing of out surroundings: Our direct link to Reality.
This is in fact, non-verbal. It is like myriads of photos stored in our neurons, that form a map to guide us along our daily path.
The base function of our whole learning system, is experiencing, storing “snapshots of experience”.
The beginning of our assumptions come in sorting, categorizing, and then using that set of organized “facts” to guide us along our daily path.
Our early life is largely an experiencing (receiving), and then a reaction of satisfaction or dis-satisfaction with what we are receiving from the world around us.
Humans begin to verbalize very early, and so the “snapshot/photo storage” in our neurons, gets a layer of verbal storage mixed in with it:
Our image storage gets a verbal overlay, and our mental pictures become words.
This happens so early, that unless we maintain a strong inner connection with ourselves, we disconnect with the actual root “photo storage experience”, and default to the verbal one. Our whole experiencing becomes one of verbal “mental blah blah blah” and organizing words, then thoughts, categorization, and assumptions. We lose track of the images in which we actually stored them.
By the time we begin to recognize the duality of “me and the world around me”, we have enough verbal storage, that our base assumptions are relatively fixed. At this stage, we have come to depend largely, on the verbal level of “data” we have in our storage.
This might seem a bit negative, but on the other hand, the more we can establish an understanding of how the world works, and how it affects “me”, the better we can navigate our way through our every day life.
Our early years are all about teaching, and trial and error, and forming beliefs and our worldview, out of our experiencing… which is now, largely verbal.
The image part of our neuron storage, is suppressed either in part or entirely, by the verbal layer laid on top of it.
So, where does our layer of “religious belief” lie?
It is built from the categorized contents of our our verbal storage, which have formed assumptions through the systematic “indogmatizing” of what we have been taught.
Almost all experiences we have about “the unseen” are taught interpretations. Humans DO have a bent towards making interpretations of our experiences, that are not confirmed in Reality. Most all “other worldly” beliefs are things we have heard from others or read, and are very seldom first hand experiences.
We end up using those assumptions to build our life doctrines and beliefs.
Most of us end up with a form of the beliefs our parents taught us, and either agreeing or not agreeing, depending on the events of our upbringing.
This, in my experience, is NOT a solid base for beliefs and actions.
If there is a clash, or cognitive dissonance between what we have assumed to date from all of this process, we must do one of several things. We must either suppress the cognitive dissonance (which will become a subconscious gremlin, and probably make our views run to extremes), or we must revisit the assumptions, and find a place where our assumptions fit objective reality.
Reality is Dharma 