Much of what surfaces as the face of the world is nothing more than a general agreement founded upon the preponderance of convenience. This might be just a little bit complex to understand, I agree. To say that the truth is sacrificed at the altar of convenience is also incorrect because it is rarely that the whole truth is knowable. In the absence of complete truth we agree to believe the closest cousin of the truth. When our conscience pinches us awake, we tell it that the whole truth is beyond human grasp and by repeating the same thing over and over again we manage to convince it to submit to our version of the truth, which, of course, is nothing more than a bunch of lies wrapped in a thin sheet of superficial truth.
What’s surprising is the fact that we are generally not conscious of this self-deception, and for that reason the one that deceives is also completely deceived. We start believing in the non-existent truth of our lies. So, we see ourselves as not what we are, but as we have told ourselves we are. And we take offense of anybody telling us that we are not what we believe we are, but are quite different from it. We see every such person as a jealous liar who wants to deride us and wants to make us think less of ourselves.
That’s the next step in self-deception. In some ways it is also the final one because once the faith in all those who could tell us the truth is rejected, there is almost no possibility of one’s redeeming oneself from the self-fueling cycle of self-deception. One is hopelessly stuck in the bog, and happily so. Believing in the world of our own delusions we go dancing around the dance of life as though there was no reality other than the one that is of our own ignorant creation.
So, the world as we know it, is fundamentally the product of our sensory inputs interpreted by our minds through systematic categorization governed by the norms that our minds impose upon the world of sensory inputs. Therefore, while the sensory inputs remain as real as the world itself, our understanding of the inputs is artificial, for it is subject to manipulation by our own minds. It is safe to assume that the world is not exactly the way we understand it to be because nothing remains the same when it is translated from one form into another form. And the world is reduced into ideas before it is understood in terms of other ideas because our minds can only deal with ideas and not things of any other kind. For mind to ‘understand’ the object must not be a concrete object but an idea of the object.
Therefore, the moment we understand something we not only reduce the object into an idea, but also comprehend it in terms of other ideas present within the mind already. Ideas inform ideas and throughout our lives we live in this mammoth world of the ideas that are produced by the delusions of our own creation.
Originally published on Ezine Articles on May 10, 2013.
