How We Fool Ourselves Over and Over: Scientific American Podcast

How We Fool Ourselves Over and Over: Scientific American Podcast

My Comment:
This observation is the cornerstone of ancient religions, and is paramount in the awareness of the serious practioners of these religions. This awareness is what keeps religious groups from also becoming political groups, and a lack of this awareness is what propels religious groups into becoming political groups.

Ultimately, the struggle never leaves the realm of you and the mirror, you and the striving to understand basic texts.

But this awareness doesn't have to be confined to religion. It is a fact of our perceptual life, in the same way that Zen is an inevitable product of what psychology terms ' good object relations', but to be more accurate, really good object relations.

Further investigation of this phenomenon would lead to the question of a collective consciousness, and therefore a collective blindness. Do these things exist? History, I believe, would say that they do. But History does not fit into a laboratory or the experimental model. It is also a question that crosses the boundaries of all western intellectual disciplines. And again, the question is raised, does the existence of these disciplines, our insistence on compartmentalizing knowledge contribute to the blindness?

Nevertheless, the battle remains personal, and can only remain personal, because there is always more information for each person to see, there is always more information that continues to escape our awareness. There is ultimately one choice each person must make, to see or not to see. Or, to put it in more dymanic terms, as did Shakespeare, to be or not to be.