William James, father of American psychology, spoke of meeting an elderly woman who told him the Earth rests on the back of a huge turtle.
"But, my dear lady, Professor James asked, as politely as possible, "what holds up the turtle?"
"Ah," she said , "that's easy. He is standing on the back of another turtle."
"Oh, I see," said Professor James, still being polite. "But would you be so good as to tell me what holds up the second turtle?"
"It's no use, Professor," said the old lady, recognizing where he was going with this. "It's turtles-turtles-turtles all the way!"
***
Social systems are betraying us instead of performing their rightful functions of educating, nurturing family, business and government life, etc. Rather they are abusing us and molding us into dysfunctional patterns; patterns that, those of us who are honest and see clearly, will reject. How can we understand this?
It appears that, often, we do not penetrate deeply enough to find the sources of our suffering. While we may decry the superficiality in society, we, too, partake in the tendency to remain near the surface of life. We preoccupy ourselves with the struggles of our daily life and the dramatic news (such as "talking heads") - as it is fed to us by a severely compromised media. This can be thought of as a doctor who treats the symptoms of an illness, relieving the immediate distress we experience, only to have the deeper source of the problem re-create our malady down the road.
I believe this occurs both due to societal norms and the fact that descending into the depths of life and our dysfunctional patterns usually requires substantial effort and discomfort. We easily remain distracted by a combination of facile, short-term solutions and our natural avoidance of what is unpleasant.
In 1962 Thomas Kuhn - an historian and philosopher of science - offered an analysis of how systems change (or don't). His book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, rocked the intellectual world by introducing the concept of "paradigm".
Using the term paradigm, Kuhn said that scientists operate from mental models that shape everything they think, feel and do. How scientists perceive and interpret experience is shaped by their internal structure of beliefs and concepts. But the reality of paradigms applies not merely scientists, but to all people. To raise paradigm issues is to reflect on the ideas that map our reality: our worldview, life perspective and philosophy. To look at our paradigms is to look at the blueprints we are using to build our worlds.
Paradigms designate fundamental categories of intelligibility and control their use. Individuals know, think, and act according to fundamental, interiorized, culturally-inscribed paradigms.
Robert Anton Wilson's similar premise is that everything we think we know about the world is in fact an interpretation of the world. Most people seem to believe that their human nervous system provides direct access to objective reality, i.e., "to Truth," but this is hardly the case. For individuals, all information is necessarily filtered through our senses, past experience, conditioning, prior beliefs, and other non-objective lenses. Even scientific findings, for all of their precision, reflect only relative truths, and those truths are further distorted by human cognition.
Thus, each of our individual worldviews can be considered a "reality tunnel" - a term Wilson borrowed from Timothy Leary. Wilson emphasized that each person's reality tunnel is their own artistic creation, whether or not they recognize it as such.
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