Hello Love!
Today we’re going to be diving deep into how our current world shapes our cognitive bias’ away from our humanity, and how this is deeply impacting us.
We’re going to explore why returning to our humanity is both a tool for dissecting our bias and a tool for helping us to find true reality.
This is a deep one, so please do make sure you have the foundations of:
Part One
Part Two
Under your belt first!
Now you’re ready for today ?
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The Logic Bias And Why It’s Not Working For Us
The first big bias I want us to take a look at is the bias we have in our culture towards ‘logic and reason’ and the bias we have that drives us away from acknowledging or using our felt sensations as a source of information.
Again this is sort of a double-edged sword in our world right now.
On the one hand pretty much everything we are sold in terms of information is presented to us via logic - words, evidence in the form of video and other media and we are encouraged to use our MINDS more than anything to determine if what we’re looking at is true or false.
Does it ‘make sense’ to our current worldview.
But at the same time, we have to realize that what’s being presented to us is often meant to be EMOTIONALLY hijacking. It’s meant to be something that insights anger or rage, panic, fear, extreme stimulation or extreme distraction - it’s meant to appeal to our FELT sense of normalcy and familiarity in order to convince us of its legitimacy.
Meaning we aren’t being taught how to use our emotions and feelings in an intelligent way to help us vet information. We are being taught to ‘think’ about what we are seeing, and to follow what feels SENSATIONAL or what feels FAMILIAR to our nervous systems - without checking in with whether or not what is being presented feels TRUE because it’s real or feels true to us because it plays directly to what we already believe.
Remember, the more FAMILIAR something is to us, the more COMFORTABLE it’s going to be to believe. The more unfamiliar something is to us, the more we are going to WANT to reject and deny its relevance and truth. The more stimulating something is, the more apt we are to believe it or reject it outright and the more extreme something is the more apt we are to accept it at face value or reject it without doing our due-diligence in terms of vetting and looking into things.
We also have to remember that we live in a culture of high pressure, high demand and the idea that we need to be moving at HYPER-SPEED.
We are living in a culture that has us SO stressed out, SO detached from our bodies, SO in our heads and SO overwhelmed that most of us don’t feel like we have the TIME to discern if what we’re being presented is based in reality or if it’s based in fantasy.
There’s so much pressure to ‘keep up with’ what’s going on, so much fear that we’re going to miss something, so much fear that we’re going to be left out or left behind and so much fear that something terrible will happen to us if we don’t stay ‘in the loop’ that we live these lives of constantly ingesting information without ever being given the time to DIGEST the information.
We are being emotionally STIMULATED and we are being handed so much information in such a way that makes us feel totally stressed and out of control - and this leads us to simply going with whatever we already believe, taking in more and more information that feeds into our current way of view things, that feels emotionally settling because it feels familiar and comfortable - and we are increasingly intolerant of any information that would suggest that what we believe, see or know is false.
We feel insecure enough as it is, we feel emotionally stimulated enough as it is - most of us don’t feel like we can tolerate doing the work of questioning what we believe and therefore questioning what we’re believing.
We’re too overwhelmed.
This is why this whole process of unpacking and looking at our bias’ has to start with COMPASSION and the ability to start to tune back into our bodies, back into our emotions, back into our felt and lived sensations and back into our ability to SLOW DOWN and PAUSE instead of being rushed from one thing to the next.
Reconnecting With Our HUMANITY Is The KEY
Learning to unpack our own bias, learning to question what we’re seeing, learning to get off the rollercoaster of information is first and foremost a return to our actual HUMANITY.
We need to take ourselves back from the urgency, back from the emotional hijacking and back from the dominance of logic over lived experience in order to create a space for ourselves in which to find actual truth in the sea of information we are constantly swimming in.
A big part of our cultural bias is that the logical mind is the THING to base ALL of our actions and lives upon - and this isn’t always the truth and the best way.
Remember - the mind can be convinced of anything. The mind can filter out and exaggerate and find and dismiss as much information as necessary to convince us that anything is real or unreal, true or untrue and it is able to literally override what we are actually experiencing in real reality in order to help us hold onto our beliefs. It is even able to develop systems of interpreting our feelings, felt sensations and lived experiences in a way that validates a belief system even if that belief system is going against reality. That’s how powerful the mind is.
This is why I believe many spiritual masters have said something along the lines of ‘the mind is a fantastic servant but a terrible leader’ as quoted by Robin Sharma.
In order to find the truth, we must be able to use the mind for its strengths, while also recognizing its weaknesses and limitations, we must understand it’s patterns and we need to interact with it in a way that actually serves us in finding truth vs. allowing it to be another thing that drags us off in directions of untruth without our awareness.
We MUST be able to dream, feel and tap into our other senses if we want to have satisfying lives and if we want to be able to unravel our false perceptions. Because again our bias’ makes sense to our MINDS - but there will always be evidence in our LIVED and FELT experience to contradict what isn’t true in reality that we can lean on to help us identify where our false bias’ are and where the truth may actually be living.
But at the same time, we must marry our dreams with the actual nature and structure of reality. We can only create from WHAT IS already. Something cannot be made from nothing and we can’t just do whatever we want - there are limits and boundaries we have to understand in order to discern truth from fiction and in order to live lives of structure, order and creativity.
So remember - a BIG part of the reason we are open to so much information, the reason we want to take IN the information constantly being presented to us and the reason we are living in a world that is so hyper focused on this passing of information is because information is the BASIS of our ability to create good lives for ourselves.
We want to be aware, informed and educated, we want to ‘know what’s going on’, what others are thinking and feeling and what’s real and what isn’t because in knowing these things we have the most power to create what we wish to create.
We have the most power to access safety, security, provision, creativity and fun.
The whole point of cognitive bias and the whole point of staying connected to information is to make life make sense, so that we can then do our best to create safety and an opportunity for expression for ourselves.
That’s the whole game.
Which is why we would even WANT to be concerned about whether or not the information we’re taking in is TRUE. Because the farther our beliefs are from reality, the more what we ‘think’ is happening isn’t what’s ACTUALLY happening, the more disempowered we’re going to be. The less we are going to be able to create safety and expression and the more we’re going to be trapped in loops of behavior that keep us having the same - or worse - experiences over and over again.
So what do we do about all of this? How do we identify our bias and how do we stop ourselves from going down rabbit trails of untruth? How do we tell if we are believing something false that appears totally real and legitimate to us?
How do we create from a place of actual connection to reality?
Finding Our Bias And Finding Truth
There is no easy process for this.
There is no ONE process for this either.
Rather, learning how to pick apart our bias and learning how to find real reality in this information saturated world is a PRACTICE and it’s one we will be engaging in for the rest of our lives.
That being said, there IS a method we can use. Now, it is beyond the scope of this article series to give you ALL the tools you need - that is why I have SO MUCH content on my youtube channel, on this website and also in The Mystery School and this is why I offer one - on - one sessions - because this can be and often is a pretty complex thing. But that doesn’t mean we can’t make massive headway with some foundational tools.
Also I’m not the only one speaking to this - so I highly recommend you also seek out other resources that help you become aware of your thoughts, your body, your feelings, how you’re currently processing things, why you process them that way and what you can do to support yourself in seeing things more clearly.
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Let’s take a pause here, and come back next week for our first tool!
<3
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