Hello and welcome back!
In case you haven’t done so already, you can read:
Before you dive into this post.
Today we are going to explore how our bias’ make us feel safe, and why questioning our bias is SO hard - even when our bias’ are not serving to make us ACTUALLY safe in real reality.
Let’s dive in, and as always leave me a comment with your thoughts once you’ve had a chance to read!
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Our Bias’ Make Us Feel SAFE
Our bias gives us a sense of having a map by which to live our lives.
Our cognitive bias again gives us a feeling of assurance that we are seeing reality ‘correctly’ and it gives us the ability to make choices and navigate our lives in a way where we aren’t CONSTANTLY having to re-evaluate what we believe, what’s happening, what isn’t happening and what the best course of action is - because we have some fundamental programs we can turn to and run without having to actively think all of our actions through. Our cognitive bias gives us a feeling that we are in control of our lives, that we understand the ‘rules’ and thus we can make choices that will lead to us having what we want and avoiding what we don’t want.
Our bias simplifies reality to match our current understanding - so that we feel like we know what’s happening, how to act, how to behave and how to avoid things in a way that will lead us to having freedom, safety and the ability to express ourselves.
Our bias’ make us feel SAFE and they help us navigate a truly complex world with patterns and programs set in place so that we don’t have to be in a constant state of thinking, assessing and determining what the best course of action is.
This is partially due to evolution - the humans of the past who were able to develop survival ‘programs’ that allowed them to sense a threat/have a need and then ACT in a way that saved them from that threat/got their needs met WITHOUT having to take too much time to ASSESS every situation - for instance hearing a rustle in the bush and automatically running up a tree to avoid being eaten by a predator - had a MUCH better chance of surviving than those who DIDN’T have this capacity. Automatic responses to life, stories that we played out over and over again - this all served us very well in terms of keeping us alive - because to have to stop, thinking about, assess and ponder every situation we found ourselves in would have meant being eaten by a LOT of lions - and so WE are the ancestors of the people who had this skill of automated response. The fact that we form and live by bias’ is a result of evolution and the need we had to be able to respond automatically to life in order to keep ourselves safe in a very unpredictable world.
All of us are going to form a BASE world view, and this base worldview will become the lens through which we perceive reality. It becomes the filter that we use to determine what information is relevant, important, accurate, unimportant and irrelevant. It becomes the mechanism by which we justify our choices and patterns and it becomes the WAY we see the world.
It starts to work both ways - the experiences we have in early childhood and the stories we attach to those experiences shape our perception, and then that perception becomes the thing we use our minds to justify over and over again, giving ourselves a sense of control - we live with the belief that if we just follow the rules we perceive to be the rules well enough, we will get all our needs met - and we then filter out any information that contradicts our world view and enhance what supports it - in order to make ourselves feel that we are going to be ok so long as we keep following the rules!
In this, we become SELECTIVE (not intentionally, this is mostly sub-conscious and something we aren’t even aware of) with the information we allow ourselves to observe, integrate and understand. Our minds are constantly at work cutting us off from anything that does not align with our stories, exaggerating anything that does align with our current world view, narrowing in on perceived ‘threat’ and literally fully filtering out parts of reality - and in this we lose bits and pieces of the Truth.
Our minds are going to be using our bias as a way of determining what information in the VAST sea of stimuli we are swimming in at all times we need to be paying attention to and responding to, and which information we can disregard and ignore - and again if it wasn’t doing this we would likely all fry out with overwhelm. The problem comes again when our filters are causing us to move into a state of true reality denial/misunderstanding/down playing or over playing - leading us to a state of thinking that reality works one way when in fact, it works in a totally other way.
This is called ‘cognitive bias’ - the act of mistakenly perceiving reality due to its opposition to our already established and dearly held belief systems.
Our capacity to tell stories, to ignore our feelings and to weave creative webs vs. being strictly bound to observing and perceiving reality just as it is a big part of what makes living from a cognitive bias possible. We are simply not operating from pure observation or from pure interpretation of facts and this is at once a massive gift as well as something that can really cause us to harm ourselves and others.
Bias’ Help Us Create New Things
This ability to create a reality that isn’t TRUE reality in our minds and then our ability to live in alignment with that created reality - opposing real reality - is at once humanities biggest ‘downfall’ and the source of much of our suffering - because oftentimes (not always) to oppose reality IS to suffer/break ourselves against reality.
To not see reality for how IT IS but to be projecting our own ideas into reality means that we are going to be taking action from a place of not understanding how or why things work how they do, which will mean we are going to expect certain outcomes from our actions that can NEVER actually occur.
We are going to believe that if we behave in X way, we should get Y result - and instead we are going to perpetually be faced with getting Z as a result. For most of us, due to how our cognitive bias works, we will then either assume reality is ‘getting it wrong’ and we will persist in doing X over and over again, continually being surprised that Z shows up as a result, or we will simply assume that Y is an impossible goal to reach and we will give up trying. We will hold onto our view of reality and reject and deny the outcomes we are facing instead of adjusting our world view to match what’s truly occurring - and most of us won’t have any awareness that this is what we’re doing, because to us we aren’t operating from a bias, we are seeing reality clearly!
On the flip side, we also want to understand that our ability to filter reality, to imagine an outcome that doesn’t yet exist, to see things not as they are but as we would LIKE them to be and to be in opposition to the current reality from time to time is also one of our greatest evolutionary achievements and it’s the reason we have any capacity to create anything that does not already exist. To be able to see that we want Y outcome and that Y doesn’t currently exist is a HUGE gift, and to be able to then work WITH reality to create Y via investigating the conditions required to create Y within the patterns of life that we are beholden to, to be able to FEEL our way to a new outcome that the mind has never actually seen/experienced before, to be able to try on different perspectives and vantage points as a way of helping us break out of our current ways of being and to push us into new ways of being and to be able to trust our natural impulses to live life differently than we are told that we ‘should’ by the culture of bias that is creating the patterns of life of those around us - this is all truly important and the reason we have been able to ‘evolve’ as individuals and as a society.
You see, this capacity to imagine is KEY to our expansion as a consciousness. Being able to see things for how we WANT them to be means being able to change our systems, change our programs and change our assumed ways of being so that we can get rid of things that hurt and we can create things that feel much better.
We can’t change the structure of reality - we can’t make it so that when we drop an apple it floats up - but we can learn the laws of aerodynamics and how gravity functions and we can use that knowledge to create an airplane that DOES enable us to float upwards. In doing so we are using our cognitive bias to look for solutions to problems in places where we may not have thought to look before and we’re using our ability to see a future that doesn’t currently exist in order to create that future within the laws of reality.
What we need to understand here is that there are two ‘fundamental’ aspects to reality (that of course are really nested in one another and inseparable in truth, but due to perspective we CAN see them as separate and this is really important!) - that which YOU are as an individual, and the Universal/Natural laws which can also be thought of as the Universal laws. Both of these aspects of reality have a malleable structure that is meant to be expanded, which can be either worked with or opposed. Our bias’ can teach us to be against our fundamental nature or it can teach us to honor and grow our fundamental nature as well as teaching us to be against the nature of reality or it can teach us to align with the nature of reality and to create and live within its structure.
When we oppose our own structure through rejection of the SELF, we destroy ourselves. Again we aren’t doing this on purpose - when we are in a situation where we have been trained that to be our true self isn’t safe, that it gets us rejected, that it causes us to be antagonized, when it leads to us being ignored or when it leads to ANY seemingly negative consequences either socially or in reality in general we are going to develop a bias AGAINST this aspect of ourselves. This means that we’re not going to be able to understand this part, nor are we going to be able to EVOLVE it into a healthy expression. This hurts and this is going to lead us in a direction of never feeling fulfilled and always feeling either mildly or VERY dissatisfied with life - even if our way of being is simultaneously getting us ‘good’ results in terms of acceptance and approval from others, and even in terms of getting us ‘good’ results in terms of provision and protection. If we are having to go against who we are fundamentally in order to survive well and be in our social groups, there will be a sense of pain that can go unexplained for our entire lives because our bias will continue to convince us that our pain is caused by what we THINK it is caused by - these bad parts - when in reality, our ‘bad’ parts aren’t to blame and there are much more multifaceted reasons for why we feel how we feel and why we are experiencing what we’re experiencing.
When we oppose the structure of the greater reality we again break ourselves as we are one with them. There is a structure to this whole game, and when we oppose the structure we bring harm to ourselves. When we believe that the cause of a certain outcome is due to one thing, and so in an attempt to change that outcome we change what we THINK is the cause - only to find that the same outcomes keep repeating themselves this means that we are wrong about the cause. But many of us again will go into a state of looking for evidence to PROVE that what we believe to be true is true - we will start to block out evidence that shows us that what we are believing is false, and we will amplify evidence that what we believe is correct - so even when reality continues to show us that what we are doing isn’t working, we will come up with stories and narratives that make us believe that EVENTUALLY what we are doing is going to work. That make us believe we are right and that reality is just behaving wrong. We will look for other people who believe what we believe, we will look for corroboration of our story from others who hold the same bias. We will see any slight change in our circumstances as ‘proof’ that we’re right, and any delay or setback as something OTHER than a delay or setback - we will justify it, make up a reason why its a part of the path, we will come up with all sorts of mental gymnastics to allow us to hold onto our current view and deny what’s happening - giving ourselves a feeling that we’re on the right path and that we are going to get what we want if we just pursue and keep going long enough.
For instance, we may have a belief that a specific dietary intervention is going to lower our cholesterol. We may find studies that support this theory, find other people who claim that their cholesterol was brought down by this dietary intervention and we may have a preconceived bias towards this certain dietary intervention given what we currently believe we know about nutrition, what the people around us are eating, what we have eaten growing up and the foods we naturally enjoy. We may then start the new diet, do it for a month or so and get our cholesterol numbers checked, only to find that they have either stayed the same or risen.
Now, without cognitive bias in this situation we would be able to say ‘ok, this didn’t/doesn’t work, I need to do something different.’ If on the other hand, this dietary approach has become a part of our world view, has become a part of our identity, has become a part of our social structure and if we feel like we don’t have any other answers that fit our preferences/that we feel capable of/that we are aware of - we may head into the territory of living from that bias - clinging to the diet and coming up with excuses for why it hasn’t worked yet.
We may blame ourselves for little slip-ups along the way, justifying that we aren’t getting results because we aren’t ‘doing it right’ not because the diet doesn’t work. We may believe that perhaps we just need to do it LONGER to see results. Perhaps we will double-down on the results other people are telling us THEY are getting, believing we must just need to hold on a little longer and feeling that sense of safety and calm that comes from our world view being supported by those outside of ourselves. We may look at those studies and use them as our justification for keeping going. We will deny the testimonies of others who have said that the diet didn’t work for them either. We will look for flaws in the logic of any other dietary approach while explaining away any holes in the plan we are following. We will push and continue to break ourselves against reality - the whole time not realizing that this is what we’re doing, the whole time waiting for the results we THINK we SHOULD be getting and being continually surprised and perplexed when we don’t get them, coming up with ANY reason that ISN’T ‘the diet doesn’t work’ to explain those lack of results.
This is the power of cognitive bias! We can literally walk ourselves off the edge of a cliff while convincing ourselves we are walking into paradise.
On the other hand, when the structure of the self is honored at the same time as the structure of reality is honored, we have the greatest chance of existing in a state of balance and harmony, as well as the greatest chance of really EXPANDING our awareness and our ability to create awesome outcomes for ourselves within the context of the circumstances we’re living in..
When we understand our own individual nature and when we are doing the work to continually expand our understanding of the structure of the world around us, we are going to have more and more creative control, if you will, because the more we can work WITH the structure of what is, the more we can EXPAND upon what is in ways that feel good to us! This is the power of working WITH reality vs. working WITH a bias that opposes reality.
The more we understand and EMBRACE the structure as it is, the more we are going to find that we aren’t as limited as we thought we were. The more we will find that perhaps HOW we thought we were going to change our lives or in what AREAS we thought we were going to change wasn’t correct - but this doesn’t mean that we can’t change our lives at all, nor does it mean we can’t change them for the positive. It just means the method and the path are going to be different than we thought.
We need to understand that the structure of who we are and the structure of reality ARE malleable - what is currently isn’t the be-all-end-all outcome and result. Everything can be changed, grown, built upon, reimagined and shifted to some degree - so long as it’s working within the FOUNDATIONAL structure of reality.
Meaning, you have some base characteristics that are ALWAYS going to be true about you - and ALL of those base characteristics can be expressed, grown, advanced, shifted and molded in a MULTITUDE of different ways.
The laws of nature and the patterns of life in general that govern our human experience on this planet have some fundamental structures that can’t be changed - but the ways in which we can express, create and shift WITHIN those structures is again, almost unlimited.
We can’t become a 6 foot tall basketball player if we are a 5 foot tall person with little to no interest in developing our shooting skills because we are much more interested in learning about wildlife - but we CAN take our 5 foot tall self and we can dive deep into any number of animal/plant life/insect exploration paths.
We can’t make an apple fall up when we drop it, but again, we can understand enough about gravity to create an airplane.
When we understand that the more we EMBRACE the fundamental nature of reality the more creative control we will have, the more we are going to seek to understand reality for how IT IS, vs. trying to make it align with what we think it ‘should be’ or what we want to believe it is in this current moment.
We have the capacity to tell stories, to imagine what does not yet exist, to see things that have not been made manifest yet and this is our greatest gift. That being said, when we use our powers of imagination to deny the structure of the self and reality, as stated above, we cause harm to ourselves and to others. It can be no other way. When we create from a place of not understanding how things work, we are not really ‘creating.’ What we are doing here is trying to get rid of some parts of reality, to deny the existence of some aspects of what is, or we’re trying to create outcomes without understanding the actual cause and effect nature of reality and what would ACTUALLY lead to those outcomes in true practice.
Bias does take us out of connection to true reality often - but not always. Sometimes our bias is true. Sometimes what we believe IS in alignment with reality. Sometimes our bias helps us to see reality more clearly. Bias isn’t always negative nor is it always false - so we have to remember that.
If we are getting the results we expect to be getting in life, if we are generally feeling good and happy with our self expression and are finding that we aren’t causing a lot of harm to ourselves or others on a regular basis - it’s safe to say our current bias’ are working for us! It’s safe to say that for now, we can keep them, and we can keep building upon them. It’s when we run into times and places where this ISN’T the case that we want to start to QUESTION and look for our filters so we can possibly SHIFT them into something better.
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How is this feeling for you?
How is this landing?
I would love to hear your thoughts!
Let’s take a break here, and come back next week for more!
<3
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