When I travel, I see people in other countries with wonder on their faces, but in America most people look jaded. Do Americans tend to stifle wonder? Americans as individuals do not stifle wonder, but the society does. Institutions create frameworks for our life experience, and heaven forbid we reject even the least significant institution. Each institution serves as a filter for all of our experience. They form a glass house that we live our lives in, and we tend to stay in, because it lets us feel supposedly secure.

Do you feel safe? One cannot feel both sage and safe. There is a way of working and living in the world that preserves wonder.

I realized this week that to suggest a new way is to propose a new conformity to people. It’s a lecture series on cognitive dissonance plus a combination of George Lakoff’s theories of hard-wired reality models. He claims that left wing and right wing are predisposed to not agree. So even the best idea is met with hostility because it is a sales pitch, and we’re all savvy and wise with superior morality to anyone and everyone around. The right and left wing split. The tendency to organize into camps. God speaks to the televangelist. God indeed does give ideas to Jimmy Swaggart types, also to Bill Gates. They call it group think.

Selling a new way. Taking the control of the thinking away from the one getting hostile.

To present the conflict in this dynamic, sure … between the right-on and the right wing, we’re all left.

Is that an epiphany? Well, basically yes. People think that they think for themselves, but more often the truth is that they think with themselves, and their selves are sets of programs that they received from society.

We learn our values from experiences. And we learn experience from institutions, including MacDonald’s.

We come in partway through the joke and the punch line isn’t really that funny in the end. Indeed.

But I DO deserve a break today! You do. The problem is not that institutions tell lies. It’s worse than that. They give you a patchwork quilt of half truths and make sure that you absolutely must be dependant on that.

I heard a science quip this week, Philosophy is to science as pornography is to sex. It takes less effort and some people prefer it. I actually agree with that statement. I would prefer science if it weren’t for its half baked methodology, but much of philosophy is soft boiled at best, light poached.

Occam’s razor is an institution now and scientists use it too frivolously. Daniel Dennet referred to this as Occam’s Broom. I will from now on call it that myself. I did want another name for it.

Everything is tainted by the views of the one doing it, science and philosophy.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~