Subject Orientation

Let’s see if I can keep this to under a thousand words.  I believe I have mentioned earlier the observation that our five senses deliver a billion bits of information a second.  Our brains, at best, can only consciously process about four million a second.   So our conscious thinking is at a serious disadvantage in the real-time existence of being in the here-and-now. 

   So then, in an evolutionary developed effort to cope, the brain makes value choices.  It does this by creating assumptions about repetition.  With those, it creates cognitive short cuts, habits, when it becomes convinced that certain activities are redundant in effort; take for instance tying your shoes.  Initially, when each of us learned that technique, we needed to focus intently and spend a lot of time manipulating the shoelaces in a manner to make a proper bow.  As we grew more successful in accomplishing that task, we focused on other things while we went through the routine of tying. Now we’re busy with internal dialog and walking daily rituals in our head while we go through that task.  We learned to not pay attention to that effort.  We’re familiar with the term habit, and that’s pretty much it in a nutshell. 

   According to John Dewey (October 20, 1859 – June 1 1952) we primarily live between the extreme of habits and impulses.  We follow habits unthinking until something unexpected happen. When that occurs we respond (to that impulse to pay attention to what has changed from the predictable routine) when we do, create a new habit, (short cut if you will) to resolve the change in our world.  In this way, it’s easy to see how we are adaptive to our environment as well as being rather cleverly efficient and economical with our cognitive energy.   We make assumptions and we venture forward with confidence in our knowing, in the belief, that we are correct in our prescribe course of action to meet our needs.

  But here’s the catch.  There are hundreds of hidden assumptions, things we take for granted, every day, that may or may not be true. Of course, in the vast majority of cases, historically speaking, these things aren’t true.  So if experience is any guide, much about what we take for granted concerning the world around us simply isn’t true.  But we’re locked into these precepts without even knowing it oftentimes.  How did this come about?  I mean besides an effort to cope with being overwhelmed by the active universe?  

Our orientation is self-centered.  As I’ve mentioned in earlier post, ‘every experience any of us has ever had centered on us.’  We are automatically sure of what reality is – and that is self centered.  Because of that not being the case, every time we don’t get what we wish, we automatically feel that the world at large is resisting us, so we respond with effort, force even, against any obstacle that keeps us from our goal.  It is often said that we get an education in order to learn how to think.  But really, it isn’t thinking that needs to be taught. More to the point, it is what to think about that really matters.  And if we’re in error about the nature of the world, where it serves our being only, what is needed then is some liberation from a self centered orientation.  The really important kind of freedom we can obtain and cultivate involves attention, awareness and discipline.  Discipline from defaulting to an initial subjective orientation of ‘it is all about me’.