ROLLING STONES CANNOT GATHER MOSS
I hope this newsletter finds you well and prosperous.
The gap between reality, whatever that is, and the way we create and interpret it is astonishingly large, yet mostly unrecognized. It is surprising how deeply we are convinced that what we perceive, think and believe is true, real and indisputable, and that other views are simply wrong. The gap between reality and fiction or illusion is even greater when we develop the capacity to see through the distortions our mind creates. In fact, we are curiously ignorant of our profound biases that are not only personal, but also collectively human.
Humans have looked for ways to either challenge or ascertain their presumed knowledge of reality ever since they appeared on the evolutionary stage. For millennia observation, reflection and contemplation have been their main tools to gain knowledge about both the natural and the psychological world. For a a very long time during human evolutionary infancy, no distinction was made between the natural and the psychological world, because humans were not capable of introspection. The ability to introspect and differentiate between signals from the external world and our internal meaning making arose only gradually. Introspection first appeared in the form of meditation and philosophy, but became much more pronounced with the appearance of experimentation and science.
It wasn't until experimentation took off during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment that a new, more objective and reproducible kind of knowledge was discovered we now call science. Through science we have gained a new kind of knowledge about how things work, including our brain, and how profoundly constructed our sense of reality is. It is fair to say that we never perceive the natural world as it is, but as our neurofirings in the brain construct it.
Because of what science has revealed about the universe, the brain and reality in general, it is now impossible to see the world the way our ancestors saw it two thousand five hundred years ago when Buddha taught the third way of mindfulness. Meditators love to pride themselves to be purists and embody the 'authentic' old teachings of the Buddha, or Jesus, Confucius, Lao-Tzu, Rumi and many others. But trying to go 'back to ancient wisdom' is a futile endeavor, not only because nobody alive today was around when Buddha or Jesus taught, but also because science and the profound ways it changed our lives changed the landscape of our subjective experience. This also means that we cannot approach meditation in the same way our ancestors did.
Our present view of the world has exposed us to reality with a degree of complexity far greater than ever before, requiring expanded ways of dealing with who we are. It also has to be said that our lives, which for most of us have become so disconnected from nature, have led to atrophy of our capacities to perceive nature's energy flows as deeply as our hunter-gatherer ancestors likely did.
In our Mindfulness Centre we are constantly on the look-out for all the ways new knowledge disrupts our unnecessarily cherished traditions, while redeveloping a deep connection with our body and the earth we have lost.
Dr. T.
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