Our minds develop fractally.
We learn things constantly from the time we are born, and even before, all our lives. We learn one thing after another. Just like Piaget’s “disequilabration” we learn things and then we learn that the things that we learned aren’t exactly accurate or are not even remotely accurate and we subdivide them. The things that we learn get refined and get differentiated as we develop fractally like the limbs and branches and twigs of a tree. And that’s just the of above-ground parts of the trees. There’s the unconscious aspect of below-ground parts of trees, too. We learn things and they tend to be more true to us as they tend to be more in tune with other pertinent parts of life.
One of our major difficulties is embracing the unlearning of things that we determine are not true. When that occurs we have to backtrack through what we learned and find out where it veered away from truth. And then look at the rest of the things that we have learned to find out how they fit more fully into the things that are true. Learning how to abandon areas of thought that have a basis in untruth is a very difficult thing. It is difficult for us to let go of areas of things that we have considered to be our knowledge of the world. We then need to reattach ourselves in new ways to the things that are true. We need to discover the importance of the things that are true and learn how they support our lives in deeper ways than we at first acknowledged.
Many of us die still having many untruths embraced. But that’s the way of life. That’s the way of many fractals. If they continue too long it becomes socially accepted, socially believed untruths. A commitment to the discovery of truth in the midst of the difficulties of discovery is one of the highest callings for humankind.
A major difficulty in the realm of discovery and acceptance of truth is social acceptance. It can be difficult to convince people that you love them even though they believe things that are not true. Love is the central key. To love folks as they change is important. To love folks whatever their level of beliefs are is critical. It’s important to learn how to share what you see as being true with people without a focus on confronting the untruths that they believe.
People tend to identify with the things that they believe. They will tend to identify more tightly with things that are less substantial, less evidential, and less provable. So when we share things with folks we need to learn how to share what we see in a broad way and come down to details later. If we share what we see in a broad way they can entertain them. They can assess them over time. They can compare them with what they believe. Then they can make decisions during their life. It’s important not to think of contesting people in a way that directly contests their identity. They can consider things over time and we need to allow them time.
Everything changes. It’s unstoppable. The study of consciousness is of critical importance. It surrounds our lives irreversibly and continually moving, continually growing. There are sicknesses that occur when we reach impasses. We often reach points where the things that we are thinking may be true hit an impasse socially, when we cannot share in a way that is receivable for other people. It’s important that we share what we think we see. The truth is that we must live in a way that allows us to prove things with others. It’s important that we love ourselves and love the people around us regardless of levels of consciousness. This gives us all a more open-ended freedom to grow. The more we learn to do this individually and with our friends the more it becomes a social norm. This is the social norm that we need to be focused on.
You may reasonably ask, “How do I determine what’s true.” Well, there are a variety of ways. One critical way is the way that science is developing. It’s important to make a distinction between science and technology. Technology tends to be more market oriented. Science should not be, although it often is, market oriented. The discoveries of new ways to determine whether a scientific theory or scientific hypothesis even is true or not is a critical use of technology. So, in that sense, technology is of high value. Technology via science is the means by which we expand our perceptions. It’s a means by which we expand our perception of reality throughout the electromagnetic array of the reality that surrounds us.
We are born with a rather limited set of perceptability that allow us to assess our immediate reality and determine who we are, what we need to do, and what is real. Learning how to make use of extended perceptions of reality is critical to us. Each of us must determine what we can trust, what perceptions we can trust. We have to determine what tests of perceptions we can trust. We can find the means to assess reality in a way that is deeply meaningful. We do not need to doubt our desire for deep meaning. We can assess deep meaning substantially. We can build a lively connection with reality that is fully satisfying.
The capacity to continually change our minds is of critical importance. We need to constantly test what we think we know. We need to learn how to discover that something we thought was true probably is not. And also learn to confirm things we had entertained in our thoughts to be actually true, probably. We need to let things have tests. We need to hold things in our minds in a way that makes them readily testable. And we need to learn how to release them when we discover that there was insufficient basis.
Transformation by Dialectic 